Saturday Evening Mass for English Majors

Here’s another way I’m a natural-born Catholic:  Saturday night vigil masses, have always been as good as the real thing on Sundays for me.  For those who don’t know me, I think religion, like gender, can and should be changed given the maturity and greater self-understanding that comes with adulthood. 

Here it is: I am really a Catholic trapped in the body of a Southern Baptist girl.

My feminist self may chaff at the mysogynist perversions of the religion, my sexual orientation may cause me to be ostracized by the Church, my hot-headed, opinionated, academic head may only temporarily feign obsequiousness towards the Holy See but deep down in my heart of hearts I know I’m Catholic.  That’s just the way it is.  I’m a sucker for the mass: the incense, the monotone chanting, the sensuality of the Cross, the slow and orderly communion-dance, even confession in darkened closed-off booths.  All these things feel as natural to me as if I’d been raised with half a dozen brothers and sisters in Rome itself.  Like many who were born the wrong gender, I’ve been preparing for years to make the change official but I haven’t quite done it yet.  I’m afraid of being found out as somehow less worthy than those who were born correctly oriented in matters spiritual and sexual...

You don’t have to be Catholic to find rest and renewal on Saturday night as opposed to Sunday morning.  (I mean, you could be Jewish but do they have night services?)  But it does help.  It also helps to be an English major, to have a roll of yarn, some needles and a public radio station on hand.  There you will find a healthy serving of Prairie Home Companion and This American Life.  I have both here in Tampa and it could be that earlier in the day I am despairing over getting another letter –certified this time- from the IRS reminding me that I owe them a $10,000 contribution towards the war effort in Iraq and I am thinking that all my options for any kind of future must be centered around life in a 6x6 concrete block room with a steel door and a stainless steel toilet-sink combination when I turn the radio on and hear those familiar opening lines: “From Minnesota Public Radio...” and I take a deep breath and the needles are clicking and the ball of yarn is flopping and I remember the redeeming power of words and how much I need to hear them come Saturday night. 

Every week, they remind me to laugh at myself and every week I vow to remember it and to not take everything so seriously and every week I forget and feel snowed under by the weight of my morbidly depression-prone mind and start writing out my last will and testament the next time an automobile in this car-loving city comes dangerously close to side-swiping me on my bicycle-commute.

I sit and knit and listen to Garrison Keillor describe me, the English major --he’s talking about me! And there I am on the radio: the bookish, unassuming, innocent, idealist, little English major and he’s telling them about my obsession -obession!- with punctuation and people are laughing, –you can hear them in the background– they’re howling, some of them in recognition of themselves also, and I see -the camera in the mind’s eye zooms out over the city on the Bay, over the dangling phallus Sunshine-State, over the country and there’s North America, Canada sprawling out up on top, Mexico trailing off to the bottom and in the middle of it all– I can see me.  Little ol’ me.  Someone whose mistakes are not as important as I tend to think. Someone whose life really doesn’t matter all that much so I think I can stop fussing over and over about what I’m going to do with it (I have to do just the right thing!)  No!  It’s just a life.  Just a life of an English major.  Of a girl who loves words and who needs to be reminded of just who she is.  Not an out-of-control bipolar maniac.  Not the self-destructive genius.  Not even –but maybe– the next great “American novelist” (we’ll see about that one; I’m young yet.).   Just me.  I can relax and live my life, a tiny part of the great machine that is the universe. 

Then Prairie Home Companion is over and Ira Glass is talking now and I shift gears –still knitting away, making great progress on this sweater which should be done in time for Spring because I find I’m not paying attention and I’ve knit something wrong half-an-hour ago and I have to rip it out and go back–  I follow his words like he’s the Pied Piper as he weaves these stories, remarkable in their un-remarkableness, their ordinary, everyday-ness that somehow captures, like nothing else, the amazing richness of life.    And I amaze myself snatching every word up greedily like a starved fool because I’ve spent too much of the past week calling the big corporations I haven’t been able to weed out of my life talking to automated answering services that never lose that thickly-coated cheerful tone whenever they tell me that they can assist me in solving my problem if I just press or say the right number.  And shame-faced, I admit how many times I’ve lost my temper in the past week, wanting to throw the phone through the window, smash the passenger side window of the car that nearly killed me in an attempt to teach me to stay off the road and ride on the sidewalk.  The guy on the radio telling me the story of his ten years as a telemarketer -a telemarketer!– is so redemptive, so moving, my knitting needles become still.  I am crying, briefly.  Reminded of the sanctity of human life.  How beautiful and quirky it can be.  How precious. 

And then it’s over.  I have been to mass.  I have listened to the sermon and heard the message.  I am moved by it, renewed by it, rejuvenated by it and made more human.  Ready to start another week.  Like a good Catholic sometimes I can’t get that far.  I need reminders;  I need a weekday mass.  Then I have to hope I’m in the middle of a really good book.  I need Anne LaMott.  Joan Chittister.  Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver.  My patron saints.  I pray to them for strength and guidance.  Just like a good Catholic.