Theomeandering

Nanticoke, west along Field Street

I was raised in the same small town where I still live. Nanticoke is predominantly Polish, predominantly Roman Catholic. I went to Church every Sunday since before I could walk, and in my youth went to my grandmother's for a brunch of Polish sausage and white bread and coffee afterwards every week. I spent the first nine years of my education in Catholic school, and most of those years served as an altar boy.

The priest at our parish for most of those years was Father Piontek. He was a crass, gruff man, balding, easily annoyed, with liver spots and at least three chins and vertical creases on his earlobes that have been correlated to an increased likelihood of a heart attack, fond of cigars and Cadillacs and black cowboy hats. He slurred his way through most Masses in a loud, flat voice, the words having become blurred by repitition into little more than sounds emitted from the larynx without any conscious processing whatsoever.

The nuns at our school were part of a dying breed, and they knew it. Only a few wore the full old-fashioned Carmelite habit. Through the years more and more lay teachers took over classes, and in the end both the school and the convent closed.

Father Piontek was eventually transferred to another parish in town, and Father Krafchak came to replace him. By this time I was in High School, or very nearly so, and was stepping away from my role as an altar boy. I was becoming more distanced from the day-to-day activity of my parish, but this seemed only natural as I entered my teens.

After High School I moved on to the University of Scranton, a Jesuit university located in Scranton, Pennsylvania. While it was only a half-hour from my home, my full tuition scholarship made on-campus housing financially attainable. I took up residence there and became a part of the U of S community.

I was not active in Campus Ministries beyond my attendance at the weekly Mass. In my Freshman year I became involved with a group called Students Against Hunger - a group whose name changed, during the writing of a press release for the campus newspaper, into Students For Social Justice.

Students For Social Justice had connections to Campus Ministries. Our faculty advisor was one of the priests in the Campus Ministries office. We hung out in their offices and made friends with Pam Tigrett, the Campus Ministries secretary.

This was in the late 1980's. Oppressive and murderous right-wing regimes were in power in parts of Central and South America, operating with the blessing and support of the Reagan administration. In Nicaragua a leftist Communist-supported regime was in power, so in this case the Reagan administration was with a group known as the Contra rebels - described as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers" by Ronald Reagan, described as rapists and murderers by people in the field. A movement known as Liberation Theology was taking root among those who worked with the poor and the oppressed in these countries, only to be smacked down and disavowed by a Pope who despised anything that had the taint of Communism, regardless of what the alternative might be.

Our Lady of Czestachowa Church and School
(a.k.a. St. Mary's)
Nanticoke, PA

It was during these years that I began to question both Church and State. The Reagan administration was blatantly wrong on a great many topics from a moral and ethical point of view. The Church, as I saw it, was wrong on the issue of Liberation Theology, just as it was wrong on the issue of contraception. But still I went to Mass every week.

Our Lady of Czestachowah Church

After graduating from Scranton I went on to a brief but horrible semester as a graduate student at the University of Delaware. It was there that I realized I would not be able to fulfill my dream of earning a Ph.D. in Physics by age 27 and settling into a career of writing advanced science books for the general public.

There was a Catholic chapel on the campus of the University of Delaware. In Delaware Catholics are fewer and farther between than in Northeastern Pennsylvania, so despite the campus being several times the size of the U of S, Delaware's chapel was perhaps somewhat smaller than the campus chapel in Scranton. That chapel became my church for the two years of my exile in Delaware.

From left to right:
New Rectory (built in the 1980's)
Convent (disused for about 20 years, slated for demolition)
St. Mary's School

Upon my return to Pennsylvania I almost immediately took on the role of full-time caregiver to my 81-year-old grandmother, who was floored with a severe case of sciatica. Both of my parents were working full-time, my brother was taking classes to become a nurse, and my sister was living out-of-state. For more than six months this was my job, to wait on her and administer her medications and cook her meals and help her get to the bathroom or into bed.

I returned to the parish of my childhood to find things subtly different. Time had had its way with the parish, and many of the old faces were gone forever. The nuns were gone, too, as was the old rectory.

My grandmother eventually recovered from her sciatica, only to be felled almost immediately by a stroke.

Wind Tunnel and Nuns' Bridge

Strokes are terrible things. Her recovery was slow and incomplete. She returned to stay with us for several more years, until her condition had deteriorated to the point that she needed full-time medical attention.

My grandmother bounced from one nursing home to another. None of them were right for her, but in the end she settled into one that was more right than all the other ones. This one had one great advantage over the others, for her at least: it was a Catholic institution, and provided a daily and weekly Mass for the residents.

For the next few years this became my parish as I attended Sunday Mass with my grandmother. The Mass provided a continuity for her with her past, a continuity connecting the Catholic upbringing of her childhood with the daily attendance of the Mass in her adult years to the suffering and loss of freedom of her final years. She enjoyed it. At the Sunday service I would pull out some token cash for the collection basket, a dollar for me and a dollar for her. Once in a while she would look at the profferred dollar and say, "Put in five for me."

She died, as we all eventually will. I saw her body in the hospital early that morning - it was a Sunday - and went to the nursing home as soon as the doors opened so I could talk to the head nurse. She told me about how my grandmother had been talking and joking with the nurses when they came to give her medication early in the morning. An hour later they found her unresponsive and without a pulse in her bed. They had tried, frantically, to bring her back while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. They cried, she told me. They had all loved her vey much.

I looked at the clock. It was almost time for church.

I went to the nursing home's chapel. The chapel was not designed to accommodate a large number of wheelchair-bound attendees. Most Sundays my grandmother and I stood in the hallway outside of the chapel along with a dozen or so other residents. We had our regular spot, and other people had their regular spots, and we were all in more or less the same relative positions each week.

That Sunday I stood alone in our regular spot. People who didn't know before that my grandmother had died, knew then.

Convent

The nursing home remained my parish for several years after my grandmother's death until Masses there were discontinued as part of the ongoing diocesean implosion. Every once in a while I would remember my grandmother's periodic request and I would put six dollars in the collection basket - one for me, five for her.

After Masses at the nursing home were discontinued I returned, grudgingly, to the parish of my youth. I felt very little connection with it anymore. But still I attended Mass every week.

It was during one of these Masses that I had the closest thing I have ever had to a genuine religious experience. It was just after the Pope - Pope John Paul II - had died in 2005, during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the portion of the Mass in which the bread and wine are consecrated and, we are told, transubstantiate into the actual body and blood of Christ. Looking at the ceremony, seeing the lights glint off the golden chalice and candlesticks, hearing the familiar words, I was suddenly impressed with the feeling that this was the moment that united all Catholics together. I saw all of the Masses being held everywhere in the world at all times in the past, present, and future, stictched together by this golden thread. As I pulled out of the mental rabbit-hole that I was pluging into headfirst, I thought to myself: This is the ultimate Catholic water-cooler moment.

Parishes are closing all around us. Father Piontek is dead, my grandmother is dead, my father is dead, my uncle, who was our church organist for many years, is dead. Father Krafchak is retiring in a few months, and the future of our parish is uncertain. I still believe that the Catholic Church is dead wrong about many issues. I hold out hope that God will someday steer the apostolic hierarchy in the right direction.

And I still go to Mass every week.

Rear Stairwell
St. Mary's School

This started out as something very different from what it became. It was originally to be an essay on religion and the politics of the Liberal blogger. Instead it became a meander through my life as seen through the filter of religion and, especially, the Mass. It comes as a surprise to some of my conservative friends and acquaintainces when they discover that I attend Mass regularly. Such a thing does not fit in with their preconceived notion of what a "Liberal" is or does. But they need to learn that "Liberals" are not bound to act according to either the preconceived notions of "Conservatives" or the confabulations of "Conservative" pundits and demagogues.

There are those who claim positions of moral superiority and yet behave in manners that are morally reprehensible. I try to avoid making any such claims, or behaving in any such ways. My religion is not the religion of the Pharisee who makes a great show of his piety so that others will be impressed. My beliefs are more quietely expressed through my actions. Who I am, what I believe, is what I do. I can make no stronger statement of the role of my religious beliefs in my politics than that.