By way of apology for this blog's lameness, a chunk ripped from the unpublished pages of Book Two. It's long, and I make no claims as to its quality, but what else have you got to do today?
“We deal with love by dealing with the ones we love, with sickness by dealing with the sick, and with death by dealing with the dead.” That’s from
Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, a memoir by undertaker/poet Thomas Lynch, who knows a little bit about such things. Death is what troubles me on those nights when oblivion looms. Death is the great stumbling block to my faith. I need to deal with death. I will deal with the dead.
* * *
St. Mary’s parish in the mid-‘80s was not blessed with a thriving youth ministry. So when Ms. Cox – mid-twenties, pretty, possessed of a hesitant but sincere enthusiasm – organized a pro-life fundraiser, the turnout was underwhelming. I think there were about six of us in the church parking lot that night, rocking in our rocking chairs for our pro-life “rock-a-thon.”
Looking back, it’s just possible that the character of the event had something to do with the low turnout. Instead of biking for a cure or marching for peace, we were rocking for life. Our kind sponsors had agreed to pledge a certain amount per hour of rocking; the thrill was that we planned to rock – wait for it –
all night long.
We were poor rockers. After a couple of hours in the parking lot, we hauled our chairs into the church basement, there to watch Bill Cosby’s disastrous
Leonard Part VI and the deeply obscure
My Life as a Dog while we shuttled back and forth for the unborn. Rocking gave way to sitting; from there, we slipped to the floor and, eventually, into sleep.
Could you not rock even one evening with me?But before we moved inside, while we were still out there for anyone to see and wonder at, a car drove by. As it passed, a guy leaned out of the window and shouted – really shouted – “Jesus loves you, Ms. Cox, and so do I!”
I recognized him: Thomas, a senior (I was a freshman). I didn’t know him, but I knew people who did. He held a high place among the alt-rock crowd, the people who wore olive drab surplus military pants, black boots, and long coats. The people who listened to The Cure, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen. Thomas was an imposing figure – tall, with very dark hair, very pale skin, a cinder-block jaw, and intense, brooding eyes. He didn’t seem to talk much, which added to the mystery.
What’s going on in there?But as I said, I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know he came from a Catholic family. When he yelled out the window to Ms. Cox, I thought,
How odd to hear Thomas mention Jesus. But the “and so do I” keeps it from being some kind of hostile crack. It almost makes it sweet, in a strange sort of way. It was the last time I ever heard him speak. A few days later, I learned that he had taken his life with a shotgun.
Here, I was not exactly “dealing with the dead.” I was watching people who were. One of them was my friend Steven, who had known Thomas better than I. I’m not sure just where Steven stood on the question of God at the time, but I suspected that he didn’t think much of religion.
“Suicide is gravely contrary to the just love of self,” reads the Catechism. “It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.” However, it goes on to note, “We should not despair of eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.”
Even so, there was some question about whether Thomas would be allowed to receive a Catholic funeral. I don’t know all the details, but apparently, it was determined that he had suffered from a chemical imbalance in his brain, and so he might not have been entirely in control of his own actions. (Good for the Church, acknowledging complexity in the causes of human behavior. Bad for doubtful me, wondering where the self resides.) As we headed down to St. Mary’s for the funeral Mass, Steven pointed out to me that he was attending strictly for Thomas’s sake.
When I set out to recount this experience, I emailed Steven and let him know what I was doing. I asked him if he would be willing to offer some comment. Part of his reply read, “I was struck that you remembered my comments about attending his service. My issue was not about the validity or importance of religion; it was about the fact that a child had died in the most tragic of circumstances, and his family had to go through the pain of getting a waiver from an institution ostensibly built on God’s love and compassion. Custom, history, and theology did not matter to me. It made me sad and angry.”
* * *
“Custom, history, and theology did not matter to me.” I ran into a similar sentiment in
Booking Passage. A hopeful Thomas Lynch had gone to Iona – “alone in the off-season on an island in the sea, ready and willing and eager for God, as I had come to understand Him or Her to be, to speak to my innermost self and soul.” Instead, he ran into a priest, to whom he made a sort of confession – an account of his beginning to return to the life of faith. In it, he mentioned his gratitude for “the woman I’d married just months before…” who was, at the moment, “tending to my children.”
“It occurred to me,” writes Lynch, “that Fr. Peter, whom I’d but moments before regarded as a bore and an intruder, might actually be an agent of God sent to this holy place to facilitate this fresh epiphany, and I was in that moment nearly overwhelmed with appreciation for his priestly ministry…”
But Father Peter was interested in more mundane matters. After finding out that Lynch was divorced from his first wife, he asked, “And was the marriage annulled, then?”
“’No,’ I told him. I could never bring myself to turn over to a group of men who had never been married the job of deciding if we, my former spouse and I, had been. I remember the erstwhile parish priest, once he got word that the ink was dry, coming by with the forms for the annulment. He was fulfilling, no doubt, his sense of pastoral duties in the matter. I told him I need a housekeeper more than the approval of a bunch of chastitutes downtown. I wasn’t very grateful for the trouble he’d gone to.”
Father Peter wasn’t impressed. “You know, of course, that as far as the Church is concerned, you’re living in adultery with this other woman.”
It was all downhill from there. My heart went out to Lynch. Even if Father Peter was right, he was wielding dogma like a cudgel. He was quenching a smoldering wick. He was being a lousy pastor, a lousy Father.
I read the passage to my friend Joseph. He wasn’t moved in the same way. “Remember Walker Percy?” he asked, citing a memorable exchange in TK:
“‘The Catholic Church is a bunch of shit.’
“‘Well, Tom, you’re something of a shit yourself.’”
Lynch was taking shots from outside the walls, after all, and he was looking for ministry from those he had scorned. “The approval of a bunch of Chastitutes downtown” – ouch.
I go back and forth. Even Lynch, just pages later, acknowledged that “faith, it turns out, is not child’s play, seasoned as it must be by the facts of life – love hurts; we die; hope falters; God, it seems, goes missing sometimes….The life of faith is less a journey into ever-more-pleasant horizons or agreeable truths, and more of a kind of rummage sale through the doubts raised by mere existence. This is where the discipline and traditions, the rubrics and language of religion provide a necessary infrastructure for our own voice, crying in the desert, at one with pilgrims everywhere…What faith is after is not comfort but salvation.”
When does our own voice cry loudest? In our darkest moments, those times of greatest anguish. The dissolution of a marriage. The death of a child. It is in these sufferings that we most need to cling to Christ. And it may be in these sufferings that we feel most alienated by the Church He founded. But the Church, besides being “built on God’s love and compassion,” is also founded on the His truth. It was Christ who proclaimed the permanence of marriage, not the priests.
I don’t wish to push the parallel. As I said, I don’t know all the particulars of Thomas’s situation. I do know that his parents were not taking shots from outside the walls. They were grief-stricken Catholics. I don’t envy the priest who had to minister to them in their sorrow while at the same time talking about waivers.
But “custom, history and theology” matter to me, if by those words you mean the tradition of the Church. Here and elsewhere, that tradition will run up against experience, and it will sometimes seem hard, even cruel. Why is the institution poking its nose in here, in this most personal of matters? The only answer that satisfies is that the “institution”
is personal, that it exists to bring Christ to persons. Christian doctrine begins with Jesus.
Bringing Christ will not always bring comfort. Or at least, it will not always bring only comfort. There is no Christianity without the cross. Christ Himself asks us to take up our crosses. Bringing Christ will bring suffering. But suffering does not falsify the faith; it only heightens the necessity of love. I’m not talking about spiritual sleight-of-hand – “Never mind the dogma, check out this kindness!” I’m talking about a love that undergirds and envelops dogma, that shines forth from even the hardest teaching, that convinces in a way that argument never could.
I’m out of my depth here, I know. I know I usually fail to show that kind of love. But I believe it exists.
* * *
People talked about Thomas a lot in the months after the funeral. Some spoke as if he had endured, but the nature of his enduring wasn’t always clear. We were teenagers, mind you, and this was a huge emotional trauma, a mix that can make for scrambled sensibilities. There was very little of the usual, “He’s in heaven now” or even, “He’s in a better place” – and certainly no mention of the possibility that he might need our intercessory prayers. Instead, there was a great deal of, “He’s still with us” or, “He’s watching us.” It sounded like people wanted the communion of the saints, though nobody said as much. I didn’t say anything, but I kept wondering,
Do you really believe that? That he’s somehow still with us? How? Like a ghost? It’s a hell of a thing to say. Where is it coming from? What does it mean, exactly?Wherever it was coming from, whatever belief it reflected, I don’t remember Steven taking part in it. And I wondered what he thought of such statements. Religion as wishful thinking? The desire to hang on to a beloved someone who is not there any more? I wondered, but I didn’t ask him. Nor did I ask Steven what he thought when one of Thomas’s closest friends condemned his suicide as “fucking selfish.”
Years later, I know a little more. Steven’s email included this: “The reality is that Thomas is with me every day…The events surrounding his passing changed me profoundly. Thomas was a wonderful person who was confronted with horrible challenges…I felt the lack of compassion that someone as special as Thomas needed. I recognized that lack of compassion in myself as well. He is not just a memory for me; he has become the part of me that struggles to love and understand the people around me.”
A couple of events from the aftermath stand out. Thomas’s friend Danny was driving a bunch of us home from somewhere one night along a country road. He got the car up to around 70, and I started to get nervous. Then he said, “We could follow him. I could just pull on the wheel and we could all follow him.” To where, exactly? I was terrified. Danny was a pastor’s son, but I had no idea what he believed would happen if we followed Thomas, or how serious he was. Happily, we talked him out of it.
The other event was the memorial radio show. One night, not long after Thomas’s death, my friend Andrew, Steven, and I managed to get the use of the college radio station from midnight to 3 a.m. We opened with REM’s “The One I Love,” ignoring its caustic bite and concentrating on that opening line: This one goes out to the one I love.
The show was nobody’s idea of a fitting memorial; we even managed to muff Echo & The Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar,” starting the 12-inch 45 at 33 rpm and ratcheting it up to proper speed just before the lyrics kicked in. But we muddled through, and finished with “One More Time” by The Cure:
I’d love to touch the sky tonight
I’d love to touch the sky
So take me in your arms
And lift me like a child
And hold me up so high
And never let me go…
At the show’s end, each of us leaned into the microphone and said, “We love you, Thomas.” Looking back, I can’t help but notice that we all used the present tense.
