Monthly Archives: April 2025
A Three Hail Mary Sin
A lot of the traumas in my life seem to revolve around overactive kidneys. When I was seven we lived in a third floor apartment in a residence with a winding staircase that sort of meandered from the entrance. There was also an eerie dark basement for storage and the washing machine. I sometimes helped mom carry laundry down there, but I was forbidden to go into the basement alone. One day playing outside in the spacious yard, climbing trees and chasing butterflies led to my delaying too long to make it up the stairs. In desperation I sneaked into the creepy basement and peed down the drain. I managed to escape both detection and any imagined ogres. But as I was saying my prayers in bed that night, it hit me, “Oh NO! I have to make my first confession in the morning! What am I going say? Peeing down the drain is the worst thing I’ve done. How many rosaries would I have to say for that?” The next day red faced and shaking I entered the confessional and blurted out, “Bless me father, for I have sinned. I peed down the drain in the basement.” There was a long silence. I got so nervous, I was afraid I’d pee in the confessional! Finally the young priest choked out, “Say three Hail Marys and don’t do it again.” I escaped to a pew and rattled off my three Hail Marys breathing a sigh of relief, but wondering if there was a book somewhere with penances for specific sins like peeing down a drain. Later as an adult I was pretty sure that my first confession was a high point of hilarity at quite a few priestly gatherings.
About this time my mom had a very early miscarriage and had to spend a night in the hospital. I stayed with friends overnight and heard the mother tell someone that mom’s baby had been flushed down the toilet. I didn’t know how babies got here, but that haunted me.
I loved my school and Sister Rose and weekends were wonderful. We could ride the street cars to Forest Park. It was huge and had an amazing zoo. Mom packed picnics and we went almost every weekend. My dad loved taking me to the zoo, telling me about the animals and teaching me funny old Uncle Remus songs about them. But the best things the zoo had were three animal shows like in circuses.
The chimpanzees were smart and funny doing tricks that would even be hard for a child. They wore costumes and imitated people making everyone laugh.
The lion and tiger acts were kind of scary. I yelled loudly, “Noooo!” when the showman put his head in the lions’ mouth! And I would put my hands over my eyes when he would make a sharp noise by cracking a whip and the tiger would roar and snap at him. Dad assured me that it was safe, but I wasn’t convinced.
The elephant show was amazing too. Girls in sparkly swim suits and feathers on their heads rode them and even stood doing ballet on their backs while they marched in a circle.
But the best part was us getting to actually ride one of them. The elephant just had a blanket on its back with the trainer sitting right behind his ears and five or six of us kids hanging on to each other behind him. I was the last one and I loved when we were riding around, but the elephant getting up and down to let us on and off was freaky. First it got on its front feet with us clinging to keep from sliding off his back end. Then it tilted left and then right on its back feet with all of us squealing. The Zoo was wonderful. I never got tired of it.
The park also had a hill with layers of fountains of water with changing colored lights and there was a snack building at the top with music.. And just before sunset we would walk over to the edge of the woods at the bottom and watch the clouds of birds fly in to settle in the trees for the night. In the winter we went sledding in the park.
There even was a glass building called the Jewel Box with all sorts of brightly colored flowers and a tiny mill house with a turning wheel that sent water trickling out along a bubbling creek, There was music and scattered figures among the flowers.
It was a magical two years of happy times with my mom and dad.
First Clue that Nobody Has a Monopoly on God
The story of my religious journey dates back to my infant baptism as a Catholic at the Cathedral in the French Quarter in New Orleans where we lived in the Pontalba Apartments catty corner to the Cathedral.
My religious memories begin when at five with a Catholic father and a Methodist mother I began First Grade in St. Louis, Missouri in a Catholic school.
When Sister Rose asked us if our parents took us to church on Sundays, I volunteered that my father did, but my mother just stayed in bed.
Shortly afterward, when I came home and told my mother that she wasn’t going to heaven because she wasn’t Catholic, my mother informed me firmly that my dad and I were going to get into heaven on her Methodist prayers. This was my first hint that nobody has a monopoly on God.
As my mother became the ‘do everything’ room mother for our class, she and Sister Rose became great friends. When some of the boys were fighting, in class, Sister Rose said, “I know all your parents and I know they don’t act like this!” Of course, I popped up and announced, “Mine do. I saw my mother throw her shoe at my father!”
Of course, Sister Rose couldn’t resist telling mom what I had said. Mom’s response was, “That’s true. But it was a house-slipper and I imagine a lot softer than the chalk board erasers she tells me you throw at the boys when they misbehave!”
I think they called it a “draw.”
Mother never bought into Catholicism, but she was supportive in every way, except one. Back when Catholics were not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, my mother served us bacon for breakfast every Friday morning.
When my dad said anything, she would respond emphatically, “It’s a worse sin to waste food.”
I don’t know about my dad, but I embraced her logic.
A Deep Well Within
Contemplative Nonconformity
There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too…. Dear God, these are anxious times…. We must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.
—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
Richard Rohr turns to Scripture and contemplation in the face of collective suffering. In the wisdom of the Psalms, we read: In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
—Psalm 62:5–6
What could it mean to find rest like this in a world such as ours? Every day more and more people face the catastrophe of extreme weather. The neurotic news cycle is increasingly driven by words and deeds that incite hatred, sow discord, and amplify chaos. There is no guarantee of the future in an economy designed to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of far too many people subsisting at society’s margins. It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health of so many people in the USA is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science, or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we’re living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism (nothing means anything; no universal patterns exist). Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers must be to first restore the Divine Center by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out. We cannot abide in such a place for any length of time or it will become our prison. God cannot abide with us in a place of fear.
God cannot abide with us in a place of ill will or hatred.
God cannot abide with us inside a nonstop volley of claim and counterclaim.
God cannot abide with us in an endless flow of online punditry and analysis.
God cannot speak inside of so much angry noise and conscious deceit.
God cannot be born except in a womb of Love.
So offer God that womb. Contemplation can help stand watch at the door of your senses, so chaos cannot make its way into your soul. If we allow it for too long, it will become who we are, and we’ll no longer have natural access to the life-giving “really deep well” that Etty Hillesum returned to so often to find freedom. In this time, I suggest some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above. You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose.
And everything to gain.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 