The Blessed Virgin Mary

As I think the Power of Prayer clearly indicates, I came from a Catholic family and, in retrospect, I think it was really quite ABNORMALLY Catholic.

At first it was just your run-of-the-mill baptism, first holy communion, confession (strangely (for a period) re-named “reconciliation” – what was this about?  Reconciling one’s self to one’s sinful conduct?  Reconciling with the Baby Jesus?  I am still not sure) and confirmation.  As I was driving Fred Ex to vacation camp today I was waiting at a set of traffic lights adjacent to a Catholic Church and learnt that reconciliation is now known as the “Sacrament of Penance”.  The Catholic Church, is ever the re-branding shape-shifting chameleon, perhaps because it believes it has to embrace a few new gimmicky sacraments to guilt the sinners back into weekly mass attendance.

Regular confession presented an issue to me as a child.  At the age of 7, really, what the fuck did I have to confess?  Lying?  Stealing?  Swearing?   Propagating anti-Catholic sentiment at school?  None of the above.  (I comprehensively made up for the not swearing as an adult) Because I was a smug-faced little crawler, who, after mass each week, would ask my mother to adjudicate on who had been best behaved during mass.  And it was invariably me (which was strangely rewarded by being allowed to sit unrestrained in the front seat, which is probably where you would be seated these days if your parents were looking for a less suspicious way to kill you).  The truth was that I was way way too frightened of committing a mortal sin and being sent straight to hell.

This naturally led to my practice of actually making stuff up to tell the priest so I wouldn’t be wasting the priest’s time (with all the guilt that followed from that).  It was also like killing 2 birds with one stone, as fabricating transgressions then gave me the sin of lying to confess to the following month.  I think this early childhood habit has manifestly shaped my adulthood.  Anytime I do something that is even slightly less than 100% morally defensible I am wracked by guilt and spend a huge amount of time effectively substituting Chip as a confessor figure.  As a fundamentalist atheist, he H-A-T-E-S it.

In addition to my anxiety about finding sins that I could confess to – not too serious that they were mortal sins, and hence fast-tracked to hell, not so minor that I couldn’t be given a suitable penance – I was also frightened by the prospect of non-Catholics.  What we would call “Christians”.  I don’t believe I ever really self-identified as a Christian.  I was a Catholic and that was quite different to being a Christian.

I started to attend Brownies, but sometimes it was a trial. There were virtually no Catholic children and I fretted it was a fertile recruiting ground for Christians.  I remember, at about age 5, innocently asking one of my mother’s friends if she were a Catholic.  She looked at me as though I were mad. Of course she was a Catholic. What did I think she was?  CALATHUMPIAN?  Something I didn’t understand but it did not sound at all reassuring and merely confirmed my view that there were Catholics.  And others.  In fact, the first non-Catholics I knowingly met were Jewish boys in my teenage years – which comforted me, because Jesus was originally a Jew before he established Catholicism.  And therefore, by logical implication I thought, Jews were closest to Catholics.

Almost immediately before we moved in with our grandparents, the Colonel decided to take us on a road trip to South Australia.  I had a sense of foreboding about the trip.  The Colonel was an Anglican, and although this fact was troubling to me, there wasn’t anything I could realistically do about it.  I could hardly encourage my mother to re-marry a Catholic because plainly that would lead her to be excommunicated she informed me, when I really pushed it.  Apart from my concern at the extended period without a Catholic adult, our holiday destination, the township of Goolwa, only had one church. It was shared between the Catholics and the Anglicans and thus moonlighted as an Anglican church every other fortnight.  I was beside myself and had a complete meltdown.  (Something more to confess? This temper tantrum would surely fall into my target sin range.)  I was quite literally having a panic attack at the age of 8 because I was not going to mass but instead a service at a schizophrenic Christian church.  The Colonel was hardly a patient and benevolent figure at the best of times, but this fuckery was something that would seriously piss off even the most reasonable of fathers.  Particularly given he is Anglican himself.  How my grandmother Patience consented to that I do not know.

But then following my parents’ SECOND parting of the ways we moved in (with our mother) with our grandparents and things took a less normal turn (if possible) than merely being concerned to ensure that I had something to tell the priest each month and working to ensure my circle was populated almost exclusively by Catholics.

First there was May*.  “May is the month of Mary” Patience would announce at the start of May each year.  And every night in May, as a family, Patience, my mother and The Sisters and I would have to say a decade of the rosary accompanied by the ancillary prayers which come with that.  The Our Father, the Glory Be, the Hail Holy Queen and the many others which I have mis-remembered and now are barely pigeon cant-prayers.  But which are in nightly use now that my OCD has taken on an alarming prayer-focussed character.

There were scapulas involved with Patience  (I never got mine – why, Patience, why? ) as well as memorising the 3 mysteries of the rosary.  The Glorious, the Sorrowful and the Joyful.  Each night would be a different mystery and it would alternate, just to mix the praying up.  I don’t know, perhaps some bored Vatican cleric thought that it was the spiritual equivalent akin to swinging?  Anyway, whatever the motivation, there are now four mysteries of the rosary, I discovered when I was googling for an image for this post, with a newbie mystery – the Luminous.   As all of our Mary May months were post Vatican II I can’t blame the new Luminous mystery on some Vatican II pronouncement imposing a new mystery. Perhaps Patience had simply forgotten about it – she was in her 70s after all at the time.  Or perhaps it was her way of passively aggressively rebelling against the “reform” agenda of Vatican II.  But what I do remember about those May nights is that the Sorrowful mystery was a particularly doleful affair as we had to been even more repentant than usual.  Which was a hell of a fucking  lot.

THE Charlie's Angels poster which adorned Quesera's bedroom wall. Note Sabrina is the only Angel with a "modest" neckline - Patience approved of her. The other Angels, not so much.

Then, perhaps inspired by the May festival of nightly rosaries, I decided to establish my own altar in the bedroom I shared with my Middle Sister.  In retrospect my unilateral decision seems rather unsympathetic to her.  She was 3 and a half years older than me – and of course was ashamed and embarrassed by what she regarded as an immense irritant. Me.  On the brink of her adolescence, I had decided to devote the wall under the only window in our room, to my own shrine.  She didn’t see it this way, claiming, I believed unreasonably at the time, that it undermined her careful cultivation of credibility by blu-tacking James Dean and Marilyn Monroe to our bedroom walls.   Not to mention the Charlie’s Angel poster.

But given that I believed I was merely doing God’s will, I ignored her protests and self-righteously claimed that as I had God on my side, what was the problem?  Piously, I would think to myself:  I am really doing this for her as well.  Can’t she see I am working for both our souls?  I pitied her.  I believe I smugly told her as much.  And I comforted myself by imagining that she was going straight to hell where she would no doubt be joining the God-less James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.  Magnanimously I would pray for her.  Which she objected to: “mum, she is praying loudly again REALLY LOUDLY and I can’t get to sleep”, she would shout nightly, a touch belligerently if you had asked me.

Patience naturally sided with me.

That little brown-nose exercise was going along very well, until Patience happened by once and caught me genuflecting at my little altar.

And why wouldn’t I?  After all, I was immensely proud of it, despite my Sister’s opposition – with its statue of the Infant of Prague, plastic images of particularly revered saints, holy cards and sometimes when I was really sucking up, little bunches of flowers.  I even had a little bottle which Patience insisted had, sometime in the 1950s, held the miraculous healing water of Lourdes.  Sadly it contained virtually no water in the 1970s. (WTF?  How could that water be considered miraculous if it evaporated like normal water?)  but it was still accorded all due respect as the Vessel Previously Known to Have Held Holy Lourdes Water.

All of this, apart from the flowers, and the Lourdes bottle was acquired at the merchandise stall up the back of the Holy Family of Somewhere Hot and Swarthy Church which I would hasten to immediately after every mass in the hope of picking up a new artifact.

Infant of Prague - Quesera's dear little holy Santa baby

But it was the Infant of Prague statue that I treasured most.  With his little red cape and faux gold tinselly-like crown, he was like a tiny little Santa baby.  My dear little holy Santa baby.  He even had a little tray under him for loose coins.  For my out-of-Lent Project Compassion collection, I reasoned. I loved him immensely.  Which infant he was or how the Baby Jesus ended up in Prague has never been explained to me.  And an Anglican ex boyfriend wasn’t about to let me find out the only time I have been to Prague –  denouncing my lapsed Catholicism and the false idols that accompanied it.

But Patience’s reaction when she saw me genuflect was hardly what I had expected or craved.  She shrieked that my zealous actions were blasphemous and unsurprisingly demanded an extra decade of the rosary that night.  There was, after all, no tabernacle in my bedroom which seems to be a condition precedent to genuflecting.  Which seemed kind of over the top, even for me – where was I going to get one of those?  Theft was clearly out and I had never seen one for sale at the merchandise stand up the back of the church.  I was bewildered with this response.  What else what I was suppose to do to demonstrate my Catholic commitment?

The Bible was of no earthly use because the (now) bizarre thing about being brought up a Catholic is that you never really do any Bible studies.  To this day Mariska, who was raised as a Methodist, is startled my complete ignorance of even the most basic elements of the Bible.  She shakes her head whenever anything Bible-based is raised and I object that, no, that can’t possibly be?  Didn’t Jesus go to Egypt for a census and then get arrested as a false profit while tearing down a temple sheet?  Weren’t Cain and Abel distant cousins of Jesus?

But while I lacked some basic elements of Biblical lore, I “knew” all sorts of “facts” about saints. For example, St Bernadette was the patron saint of tuberculosis of the knees.  (True.  I believed this until well into adolescence.)   As well as about probably the most important teachings the Catholic Church has to offer.  Those that relate to sex .  And we small Catholic children were drilled that it was the natural order of things that priests could neither be married nor women and of course there was to be no premarital sex and no divorce.  Which left me fearing for my own mother’s divorced soul, even though I secretly wanted her to re-marry a Catholic father.  Because of course this is all decreed somewhere in the Bible.

There were also complicated Catholic rules which came into play at certain times of the year.  The one which I still shudder when I recall centres on the Palm Sunday Gospel.  This is the longest Gospel in the whole year, at about 20 minutes, even longer if Father Farrer was in a bad mood.  From the time I was old enough to remember going to mass, we were exhorted that if we stood still, absolutely still, during this Gospel, a soul would be liberated from purgatory and would make it to heaven.

By the end of most Palm Sunday masses I was a mess, solemnly believing I had consigned some poor sucker to another year in purgatory because I could not stop myself wriggling or jiggling.  Patient’s incessant pinching didn’t help either.  And to make matters worse, we were encouraged ahead of time to pick the person we were trying to liberate.  So consigning that person to eternal damnation (or at least until the next Palm Sunday) was personalised.  And of course there was the Project Compassion rules each Lent with the deprivation and frightening starving faces that involved.

Finally, contemporaneous with all of this, I became fixated with having A Calling.  As I saw it, this would happen if God found me to be exceptionally devout and “deserving” of joining a convent.   That is, foregoing a life and instead becoming an indentured slave to a monstrous parish priest.

I simultaneously wanted and feared A Calling.  On the one hand, it would mean that God found me a particularly deserving and good child, worthy of devoting my life to God.  On the other, it would mean wearing a nun’s habit (at that time, 70s brown was the favoured hue), a veil covering my then lustrous dark hair and, naturally, no boys.  And quite possibly a not insignificant black moustache, like Sister Regina.  I was seriously torn.  If God wanted me, did I have any choice in the matter?  What did my own happiness have to do with it?  But then again, there was something strangely enticing about being selected.  It would make me special and could lead to me one day being immortalised as a dear little plastic statue on some demented Catholic child’s personal altar, if I were canonised.

Coupled with this fear of The Calling, every move at home was policed with the constant threat of:  you can’t do that, Father Farrar might come over and see up your skirt. (Yes I know, in retrospect this was probably the sole motive of the visits of most priests.)  Don’t sit like that it’s immodest.  Father Farrar might see up your skirt.  Of course, Father Farrar never came and Patience led us to believe, and I think believed herself, that we were Catholic pariahs.

The only person who didn’t regard Father Farrar’s absences as a grave blow was Grandpa who was more than happy that Father Farrar wasn’t blowing in, interrupting the Saturday afternoon horse races.  He also no doubt considered himself fortunate that few of Patience’s exhortations to stop sitting immodestly, Father Farrer might see up your skirt were directed at him.  But like all lapsed Catholics, he of course repented on his death-bed and permitted Patience to have the last rites read to him.  Probably just to stop the rosaries which were on a consent loop through all 3 mysteries.

But I was still expected to attend weekly mass under the gaze of Patience.  But not so careful that she actually spotted me engaging in the vandalism of a pew (she would have been well into her 80s and no doubt had macular degeneration).  I am not sure how it came about, but it had to do with me obtaining a pen from my mother (no doubt I lied (at least there would be something new for next month’s confession) and said it was for writing on the weekly offering envelope).  Then tracing over the word F-U-C-K (correctly spelled, we were back from the low-rent Adelaide suburb, although I didn’t realise at the time that this was the correct spelling) which had been carved into a pew by a much naughtier child than me.  Hey, I was just tracing.  This kid had brought a weapon to mass to carve the f-word into the pew.  My penance was a weekend at the church with boot polish (supervised by my mother) to try and remove all traces of my defacement.  It didn’t work.

The likelihood of A Calling seemed remote.  No amount of boot polish could erase the stain of that sin.  At least I had something new (and true) to confess to Father Farrar.

* I still subconsciously consider May to be the month of Mary which I think should comfort Chip and Fred Ex both of whom are May babies, but as Chip is a fundamentalist atheist it has the exact opposite effect.