Hebdomas Sancta — Soulwrights

In a basement smelling like mold, a pastor has just finished drawing a cross-section of a bucket on a whiteboard. He turns toward the dozen adolescent boys seated in school-desks that do not match and says,

“Catholicism is like a bucket.”

He fills in a portion of the bucket with blue marker.

“The more holy things you do, the closer you are to being saved. You have to fill the bucket in order to be saved. In order to be get to heaven, you have to go to communion, go to confession, stuff like that.” He fills the bucket. “This is called ‘Salvation by Works’, and it’s not Christian. God gives us free grace. All we need is faith.”

All of us boys nod our heads and take our notes in sloping, uneven writing. It was the first time I had ever heard about Catholicism.

* * *

I hold a bundle of palm branches against my stomach, pulling the leaves out one by one to hand to parishioners once the Palm Sunday Mass has finished and we have begun to leave in peace. I wear the purple robe of a catechumenate, which my girlfriend Leena laughs at. When I say that it’s an ancient practice, she says that ancient practices can be silly. I don’t disagree.

Two children come up and squabble over who will take the palms for their family. I give an equal amount to both of them and leave them to return to their parents. An old woman using a walker comes to me and puts one tremulous finger up – I give her the leaf, which she clutches close to the walker as she heads toward the door. When the sanctuary is empty, an attendant shows us where to place the bundles by the altar for the next Mass. We bow to the altar before we turn our backs to leave.

At home, Leena and I are making lunch and looking up ways to fold our own leaves into crosses. They were blessed with holy water this morning, the priest using a thick brush to fling the water from the baptismal font over the leaves now sitting on our table as we cook. We slice pears, spread goat cheese onto the eggs. The pan sizzles and pops with the oil. We shake almonds and cashews onto our plate, spoon honey into our tea. We bless the food, and I find a website with directions for the sacramental origami.

“Let me see the picture?” Leena says. Before I can begin to read the instructions, she studies the picture at the top of the article. She has dyslexia. The way she explains her experience to me is that she thinks in pictures, not in words. When I hand her this story to read, she will have to concentrate to decipher it the same way I would struggle if shown a complex mural, which she would understand in an instant. After only a few moments of studying the picture of the finished product, her fingers take the palm leaf and bend certain portions, pulling it together, drawing ends tight, until the needle-like leaf exists as a cross in my hands. I run my fingers over its green: it is supple. When I hang a rosary on my car’s rear-view mirror, I will ask her fingers to fix this cross to its beads. Later, when the liturgical year has run its course and we are again entering Lent, I will return the leaf to the church, where it will be burnt to provide ashes to spread on the congregants’ brows. Until then, it hangs from the mirror in my car, swaying when the AC blows too hard.

* * *

“It feels like I’m getting ready for a wedding” is all I can say.

The Triduum has come, and the calendar has reached its zenith. Maundy Thursday is its gateway with the Chrism Mass, the commemoration of the Last Supper, the institution of the Eucharist, the washing of the Apostles’ feet, Christ’s arrest in the garden: the evening drips, and the air is hushed when we walk in and bless ourselves with the holy water by the door. An icon of the supper-table rests by the door, and the elderly kiss their hands and caress it as they walk by.

The night is hallowed unto itself, but all we can think about is the tongue-full of bread and sip of wine we will receive the day after tomorrow. I do feel as if I’m preparing for a wedding. My robe flutters around me, and my heart pounds. My eye returns again and again to the empty altar. My fingers turn the rosary in my pocket over and over, toying with the beads. I’m truly anxious in a way I had not expected. A part of what had brought me to this pew in a Catholic Church was a retreat from the smoke machines and strobe lights of other churches. When I walked away from those services, I felt deprived, offended that they had tried to put emotion in my heart. I sought the silent marble-floored and wooden-pewed piety of the Church. You can imagine my surprise as my heart pounded a background beat to the quiet churning of the baptismal font, playing its tune of liquid life over and over.

This water is poured into large bowls near the end of the Mass. Our priest ties a towel around his waist, and gets down to his aged and knocking knees, where he washes the bared feet of a small number of parishioners in front of the altar.

“What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.”

I still do not understand. I have not yet reached afterward. I pay lip service to symbol’s significance, but I cannot translate it for myself. Looking back to the priest’s crawling on his knees to wash the feet of the faithful, I can write an essay on it. I can explain its meaning, how we must inhabit Christ and bring him to the world. I can recite how St. Theresa of Avila said there is but one body of Christ on earth, and it is us. I hear the words and say Amen but I cannot feel Christ’s ear to know he has heard me say it.

This does not worry me. Faith is not unthinking, but I hope for myself that it may be unknowing.

* * *

The expectation of Maundy Thursday has deflated on Good Friday. The bubbling of the baptismal font is stilled. The electric lighting has been dimmed. The priest processes, followed by catechumenates (those who are formally entering the Catholic Church during the Easter Vigil the following evening) carrying a large wooden cross above their heads. I am one of them. We carry it barefooted, and sway with the priest. I watch the robes about his feet, the stitching glittering in the candlelight, trying to follow his movements exactly.

The procession reaches the altar at the front of the church. My arms are shaking – the cross is heavy. With the long, frequent pauses to chant, the six of us are ready for relief. A stand has been placed before the altar so that as the cross is laid down, the head rises a couple feet above the ground. This signals the end of the formal liturgy – now begins the Veneration of the Cross. The whole congregation comes forward to pray over the cross, or bend down to touch it, or kneel to kiss it. I sit with the other cross-bearers to keep it steady, bracing it against the faithful who will lean down upon it. I feel embarrassed to be so close to them for such a personal moment, and keep my eyes downcast.

When I reach home, I realize I can never invite my childhood friends to my church’s Good Friday service. There is a boundary to our worshipping together that feels as real as the wood that I wept over. They will not reach down to kiss and cry over wood with me. And I love them.

* * *

One reason I found myself visiting Mass, before I joined the confirmation class, is that I needed a faith that took hold of my body. I needed my faith to grab hold of my hand and force it to draw Christ over me. I needed baptismal water on my forehead every Sabbath, and penitential ashes every Lent. I needed prayer that was a weight in my hands.

Here is how you pray the rosary: you say the Nicene Creed, an Our Father, three Hail Marys (focusing on Faith, Hope, and Love, respectively). That is the prelude. Then come the five “decades” (cycles of ten beads, a Hail Mary on each). On each decade, you meditate on different scenes from the life and ministry of Christ. Depending on how slowly you allow yourself to say it, it can take from ten minutes to a half an hour. It is not a simple prayer, or an uninvolved one. If you kneel while saying it, your knees will be aching. If you sit, your mind will wander terribly and you will struggle not to nod asleep. For myself at least, when I pray, my body strays. The anchor point is the wood turning over in my fingers. Wood can spur prayer because flesh can become God. So many of the useless abstract, doctrinal arguments miss the point: icons and statues and beads and other material can be holy because God can condescend into material. We live in a world where God has left footprints in the clay and sweated over shaping wood: our own interaction with the material should reflect that.

When I realized that, it wasn’t long before I longed for Eucharist.

* * *

I am not interested in argument. I am not interested in drawing divisions between brothers and sisters because of theology. I do not feed fires, even if I cannot put them out. Suffice it to say, I longed for the Eucharist because I wanted Christ to come to me. Even if you, reader, find Catholic theology detestable, I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of a man who had no place to lay his spirit to rest for years. Mere Christianity is a good place to meet others, but as a friend at the time put it, the hallway is no place to live. I needed to rest in Christ, and I needed Him to be real to do so. I needed to live in a world transformed by Him, where the magic and enchantment of the most fantastical stories drawn by Lewis and Tolkien were only shadows of what had actually been accomplished by Him. I found this fairy grove, the glowing trees and fairy ring and spark-shooting wand, in a Catholic Church on the Easter Vigil.

It has been, since the beginning of believers coming together, the celebration of baptism and chrismation. It is the mark of water and oil on the brow that seals your death to all and the beginning of your life devoted to Christ. Which is to say, your life devoted to your spouse. Your life devoted to the poor man you meet outside the hotel asking for a meal. Your life devoted to the awkward classmate you never sit next to. Your life devoted to the defense of the most transparently hypocritical person in the pew at your church, the one who everyone mocks behind their back. The water and oil was my new-birth. After the priest drew the cross on my brow with holy oil, walking back to the pew with chrism dripping onto my white robe, I could not comprehend this. The smell and the texture of the oil was enough.

The water and the oil lead to the bread and wine, of course. I must confess, I do not have words for the Word made flesh come to be taken into our own flesh. This was what I felt taking bread and wine inside me: a flush. I felt a shiver run through me. It was a static electricity passing over all my being. And then, a rush! All my blood on fire, running in my veins, my arteries bursting with blood not mine. Strength and song in wheat and vine come down. Tears and oil on my white cloth, with a wine-stain over all the world. εὐχαριστία! Tongues and flames not mine are gathered up in the air, and thanks swim together. Amen.

* * *

When I came home, I was faced with a dilemma. I rubbed my forehead, now sticky with the chrism. I never asked what the protocol with chrism was after confirmation: would it be sacrilegious to shower it off? Would a sponge bath be better? I ended up just leaving it for the night and tried consciously not to rub it against my pillow. There was an absurd childish pang of sadness when I replaced the taste of wine in my mouth with a glass of water before bed. I did not have any miraculous visions in my dream that night. I hadn’t noticed in the rush of liturgy, but I would learn later that week that Leena’s parents had left before communion, feeling unwelcome, if not insulted, that they could not share what I was there to receive. I didn’t speak with them about their leaving. My father didn’t tell his Southern Baptist family what I’d done, and even today I dodge the subject around them as best I can.

Depending on the source and criteria for counting, there are at present between one and thirty thousand Christian denominations. When I am at my most cynical, I wonder if I joined the Catholic Church because it was simply the largest, and that number of people couldn’t be wrong. It isn’t hard to fake spiritual experiences. Perhaps the poetry of paradoxes I find so beautiful in my faith are just so many non sequiturs we’ve strung together to explain it all. Maybe bread should just be bread.

* * *

Every Christmas season, Leena and I bake Julekake, a traditional Scandinavian Christmas bread. We take our time, make a day of it. Go to Kroger if we’re missing anything, laugh while we’re pushing the cart. We’re liberal with the cardamom, and pour the cranberries and raisins in the dough. We peel an orange, cut the rind up, mix it in there too. We eat the flesh of the orange and kiss the citrus off each other’s fingers. We dance to the Baking Playlist.

By the time our oven timer goes off, the air of the house itself is delicious. I would spread that air on toast, if I could. The loaf comes out, a kind of birth, and we linger in the kitchen while it cools. I try to see if any crumbs have fallen off so I can sneak them in my mouth. If possible, though, we don’t eat it by ourselves. It doesn’t really belong to us. This past Christmas, we ate it with our families both gathered together. I cut the loaf more carefully than anything else I’ve ever cut, the bread broken but not divided.

There were no empty seats, then, and there was no bread left when we were done.

* * *

Jonathan Hart lives in his native Lynchburg, Virginia with his wife and (new) baby. He enjoys a small cup of coffee with a big plate of breakfast, poetry, Icelandic music, and being in status viatoris.