A Precious Box
'Sacred' is in the Eye of the Beholder
by Sally Cole Mooney
The following article is from Free
Inquiry magazine, Volume 21, Number 34
When I heard that the relics of St. Therese of Lisieux were coming to the
church in my New Orleans neighborhood, I braced myself. I knew this meant traffic and parking problems and a whole lot of hype. The local news
couldn't seem to get enough of it, triggering a memory from my children's grade-school days. A Catholic mother had told me her newborn fourth child's
name with the cryptic comment, "We had to have a Theresa." Now I understood
what she had meant.
I was determined to rise to the occasion, let the local culture strut its
stuff with a minimum of grousing on my part. I vowed not to guard my parking
place with garbage cans on leaving for work, in the mean-spirited way of those who live near the fairgrounds where Jazz Fest is held or those
Californians with beach-front homes who extend their property lines into the
ocean. Modern-day pilgrims need parking spaces, too, I reminded myself, and
willingly hiked a block and a half from my car to my front door at the end
of the day.
Then the six o'clock newsman warned us the church would be open all night, to
accommodate the faithful. I could feel my own pledge to accommodate waver,
so I sought an analogy, imagined Lucy's bones on display at Tulane and myself hellbent to see them. Theresa and Lucy, the Carmelite and the
caramelized. As far as I could tell, there wasn't much difference. I decided
to see what all the fuss was about.
I enlisted my son, Chris, to accompany me. In some irrational way, I sensed
the church's authority, its power like that of the awesome sea, and felt the
need to buddy-up. We queued outside St. Dominic's, trying unsuccessfully to
blend. I just couldn't muster that beatific glaze the other women were wearing. I'm tense and edgy, having too long juggled kids and work and long
commutes. And Chris is hairy. His high-school friends dubbed him "Chewy," in
reference to Star Wars' Chewbaca, and in this line he looked like a
testament to Darwin.
When we got inside, I saw an old neighbor who was serving as an usher. Her
son used to come by our house on muggy summer days after church camp in his
"July for Jesus" T-shirt to play with my young heathens, and she knew I wasn't Catholic. I remembered my mother yucking it up over that T-shirt when
she came to visit, but now the tables were turned. I almost panicked, moving
two-by-two with some ancient woman toward the altar. Chris had slipped behind, and I couldn't see what lay ahead. Even worse, everyone was chanting
in sync with loudspeakers churching out Hail Marys, and neither of us knew
the words. A child of the fifties, I could have held my own if it had been
the Lord's Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm, since in those days we chanted
and prayed in public schools every morning. I don't think Chris knew so much
as "Jesus Loves Me," my base line for religious literacy. And I wouldn't have either if it hadn't been for school. My father was compulsively
sacreligious. If someone was tone-deaf, he would say, "He couldn't sing 'Come to Jesus' in the key of C." If an old friend dropped by, he'd say, "I
haven't seen you since Christ was a corporal." I had to shift gears when I
went to school in the morning, like a kid growing up bilingual.
We had been given little cards with St. Therese's picture when we entered the
church, and as we reached the altar I noticed people rubbing their cards on
the outside of the plastic case protecting the relics. I didn't know what that was all about, so I just looked. Inside the plastic bubble was a
beautiful box-like something out of a Hollywood pirate flick-its deep, rich
wood girded with gold bands, a real objet d'art that would have been at home
on the third floor of the art museum with the Fabergé eggs. But I couldn't
get any farther than that to feel the mystery or spirit or whatever the woman behind me was feeling as she lifted her child up and showed her how to
slide her card along the casing. As I passed out the door I looked back to
see Chris rubbing his card with the rest of them. If I had been anywhere else but in that church, I would have laughed out loud. But then we learned
that having rubbed his card, he was now in possession of a certified relic—in a kind of gilt by
association—whereas I had just a postcard. Today as I look at the picture of St. Therese, I'm not sure if it's Chris's or
mine, the real thing or the mere image of a fifteen-year-old nun who died of
tuberculosis in 1897 saying, as the legend goes, "I'm not dying, I'm entering into life."
When we got back to the house, I plunged into algebra with my daughter, Kate,
who had an exam in the morning. She was about as out of place in her honors
math class as Chris and I had been at that altar, and I was getting worried
about the night ahead. She needed her sleep to cope with that exam, and I needed mine to make it to the one I was giving in the morning. But the
pilgrims kept coming. From my room I lay awake listening to car doors and voices and the click of high heels. To make it worse, every time a door
slammed, my dog would bark. Somehow I finally drifted off, only to be jarred
awake by church music blaring from St. Dominic's towers. I couldn't believe
what I was hearing, nor the fact that my clock read 1 a.m. Chris had heard
it too, though Kate miraculously stayed asleep, and the two of us had had it. I stuffed my nightgown into my jeans, threw on a jacket, and set off up
the block, thinking of a lifetime's unrequited gestures . . . the lint screens I'd cleaned in apartment-house dryers and the coated ones I'd found
left for me, the picnic tables I'd washed on vacating campsites and the sticky ones I'd arrive to find, the dog poops I'd scooped and the ones I'd
stepped in . . . all that doing unto others, and now, the last straw, that
parking place I'd sacrificed paid back in organ notes, my tolerance flowing
up a one-way street.
Harrison Avenue looked surreal at this hour, all lit up with church ladies
milling about in some weird parody of the action on Bourbon Street. A patrol
car waited on the neutral ground across from the church with two officers like bouncers or hawkers, I wasn't sure which. I walked up and asked them,
"Is the Catholic church above the law? They were startled, and I had to ask
again. "Is the Catholic church above the law? Because I've got an exam at 8
in the morning, and I'd like to sleep. If I played my music at 1 a.m. on a
school night, you'd be knocking at my door to turn it down." To my surprise,
the policemen agreed that the music was unnecessary and promised to cut it
off. I walked back home and for four and a half hours slept the sleep of the
just.
The next morning wasn't half bad. At least I was getting out early enough to
avoid the chaos of the ten o'clock procession carrying Therese's box from St. Dominic's to Mount Carmel, several blocks away. And I must admit I felt
a glow from having taken on Rome and lived to tell about it. On my morning
commute I noticed a familiar bumper sticker on the car ahead of me—"Think
Globally, Act Locally"—which seemed this morning to have gotten it wrong.
The Catholic Church had no problem thinking big—globally, even
cosmically—but it had lost all sense of the local, couldn't see itself as a
building in a neighborhood, adjacent to houses with people inside, couldn't
imagine the lives behind those doors, the single mothers making grocery lists and the girls learning algebra. It was calibrated for the big event,
the arrival of relics in a gilded box, or the Judgment Day, which for St. Therese marked not the end, but the beginning of life, "Life" capitalized,
the real thing.
Then I thought about that box and just what had been inside that would sum up
the person who had been Therese. Her habit and her rosary beads? I remembered the Box of Precious Things that my brother, Tom, had kept since
the day he found it, an old jewelry box, in a garbage can when he was eight
years old. In it, he had a picture of his best friend, Jan; a chunk of Jan's
original pigeon coop; the first wood shaving he had made in wood shop; his
milk teeth; a Lucky Lager bottle cap with a bullet hole shot through it; the
tip of the garden hose he had brought along when we moved from Louisville to
Tempe, Arizona, in 1959; the jaws of a walleye pike and the Canadian Jig Fly
he'd caught it on; a twenty centavo piece that he and Jan had put on the railroad tracks to flatten; a firecracker from a long trip to Mexico in
1963; an old guitar pick from 1966 or so that he had found inside our piano;
a beer bottle opener that he had used during the year he lived in Mexico; a
piece of the shirt he had worn when he first soloed an airplane; and a scrap
of paper on which he had written, "John Lennon Died Today."
All that small stuff, it seemed to me, had captured the essence of a life
well lived-an ordinary life-one deserving of an upper case L, a spot on the
local news, and a procession of humanists filing by (during working hours,
in sensible shoes) to celebrate what it's really all about. With that thought, I eased into the grind of just another day in New Orleans.
Sally Cole Mooney is associate professor of English at Delgado Community
College in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is a member of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association. Her "Living by the Bells" appeared in the
Winter 1999/2000 Free Inquiry.
|
Subscribe to Free Inquiry 
Order Free Inquiry Back Issues 
Free Inquiry Home Page 
Council for Secular Humanism Web Site