Tag Archives: religion

Baptismis Interruptus

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Posted: February 19, 2019 at 9:37 pm

When our daughter was an infant, Carol and I wanted to please our Catholic mothers by arranging our child’s baptism. We made an appointment to see Father Holland at our local parish (the same Catholic church in which 52 year old Pierre Trudeau married 23 year old Margaret Sinclair, but I digress). I figured it’d be a meet ’n’ greet, fill out a couple of forms, choose the baptism date, easy-peasy. Father Holland was a soft-spoken, rotund man in his 60s, with that blank expression many priests have which says they’re trying hard not to judge you, but you know it’s in their job description so they’re doing it anyway. We sat across from Father Holland at a scratched table in the Sunday School hall attached to the church offices. Crude, child-drawn pictures of Jesus with blood running from his brow and hands adorned the walls.

“It’s nice to meet you Carol and Bill. Before we get started, I’d like you to watch this short presentation about baptism.” From a cupboard, Father Holland brought a cassette recorder and an ancient slide projector, the kind with a circular carousel on top. I’d last seen this projector in elementary school, in the late ‘60s. He drew the blinds and pulled a string which unrolled a white screen from the ceiling. 

“Every time you hear a beep on the tape recorder,” said the priest, “click on this little button and the next slide will pop in.” He switch off the lights, started the tape, and shuffled out of the room.

 Father Holland left us alone to watch his baptism slide show entitled something like, “Your Child Won’t Rot in Purgatory.” The story was comically outdated, by all evidence produced in 1940. In every scene, the wife wore a dress, high heels, a frilly apron and yellow rubber gloves…because she was always washing dishes. 

Watching those slides, I was taken back in time to Ascension Catholic Elementary School. Each week in religion class, we were entertained by similar slide shows with uplifting titles such as: 

Resist Temptation

Creation: The Real Story

When Man Walked With Dinosaurs

Suppress Those Feelings

Mary’s Special Friend

Your Duty To The Priesthood (striking fear in alter boys everywhere)

We loved those slide shows in the way movie buff hipsters flock to see Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie so bad it’s great. However, what we liked most about the slide presentations is that they invariably resulted in chaos. This was because class clown Marcel Thibault could perfectly imitate the tape recorded ‘beep,’ the beep that told Sister Theophane to advance to the next slide. Marcel always sat at the back of the darkened classroom, and it was impossible to distinguish where his beep came from…he could throw his beeps, like a ventriloquist. He made untimely beeps, causing the nun to advance the slides at all the wrong times. The slides became hopelessly unsynchronized with the narrator’s voice. Sister Theophane became frustrated and confused, and general hilarity ensued. This happened every week.

Back to Father Holland, who re-entered the hall once the baptism slide show ended. He held a form secured by a clipboard, and asked for some basic information.

“…and where did you two get married?” asked the priest, pen poised.

“In Huatulco, Mexico,” said Carol.

“In which church?”

“We eloped,” I said. “A Justice of the Peace married us on the balcony of our hotel room.”

“Oh. Oh my,” said father Holland. “That will never do. You’re not married then. Okay, well, the first thing is that I will have to marry you in this church.”

“But we’re already married…”

“And before you two can get married here, you will both have to take the marriage preparation course.” Father Holland folded his hands on the desk. “Which I will teach you.”

“Let me get this straight.” I could feel my heat quickly rising. “I’ve been in a monogamous, loving relationship with my girlfriend, now wife, for 11 years. You, single, never married, and celibate, YOU are going to teach ME how to live in a committed relationship with a woman.” 

“The course is only 6 weeks. I’m confident you’ll pass if you have an open mind.”

I calmed myself, and let father Holland drone on about the marriage course he was going to teach to a couple married already a year, and who dated for 10 years before that (don’t judge me, that’s my mother’s job). I didn’t want to cause a scene, in a church, but then the meeting veered on a bizarre tangent. In the middle of nattering about Catholic education and our obligations to our child, Father Holland pronounced that the Harry Potter series was the work of the devil. He forbade any Catholic child to read the books or watch the movies. Now, I am prepared to listen to differing opinions, and suffer some lonely priest devaluing the relationship I have with my wife, but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit quietly while anyone disparages Harry Potter. There’s only so much a guy can take. Our friendly baptism education session took a dark turn at that point.

Suffice to say, we weren’t remarried, neither of our children are baptized, and except for weddings and funerals, I haven’t darkened a church door since.

The Virgin Mary Gave Me The Finger

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Posted: June 13, 2016 at 9:32 pm

 

Did she wave at me? She may have waved at me. That nice Jewish girl, on the hill, I think she waved at me. Too bad she’s a statue and she’s already with another Guy.

It was the summer of 1985, and I was biking across Ireland, alone. It was a miserable trip; Ireland was all hills and wind and rain, and the first pleasure I had each day was a Guinness at 4pm. That beer, almost as good as the one in the locker room after playing hockey, was always in whichever pub I could find a meal and a room for that night. Once I had that first Guinness, I didn’t leave the building until morning.

There was a glitch one afternoon in Kinsale, a County Cork village at the end of my exhaustion. I couldn’t find a room in Kinsale, and I couldn’t ride further. All I could do was have a beer and chat with the locals in a pub.

“I have a room for you, if you want,” said a cloth-capped, 40-ish man with a blackened thumbnail, like he had a hammer mishap. His name was Paddy, which I thought was an Irish stereotype until I kept meeting Paddys in Ireland.

“Really? You run a B&B?”

“No, but it sounds like you’re stuck,” said Paddy. “We have an extra room. My wife won’t mind. She’ll make us dinner.” This sounded great, until he told me he lived 10 kilometres away, on a dirt country road, and he couldn’t fit my bike in his car. We had another pint before I saddled up for a weaving, dog-tired pedal to Paddy’s house, powered by Guinness-fuel.

Paddy’s wife served stew. I’ll let you guess which kind.

Dinner almost done, Paddy said, “So, have you see the moving Virgin?”

Virgin? Not at my university, I thought. “Uh, I’m not sure what you mean. Which virgin?”

“THE Virgin, of course,” said Paddy’s wife, named (what else could she be named?) Mary. “At the grotto.” As Mary dished out second helpings of stew and beer, she recounted the biggest story to ever hit the nearby village of Ballinspittle (the oddness of this name is your guarantee I couldn’t have made it up). While I biked through Irish storms for two weeks, I was unaware tiny Ballinspittle was the centre of national attention (remember, it was 1985, pre-internet). A dog walker noticed a statue of the Virgin Mary waving at him from a secluded hill. Word spread, and 100,000 worshippers and spectators flocked to Ballinspittle’s nearby grotto soon afterwards.

“Well, I have to see that,” I said. This was better than the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. “I’ll ride my bike over after dinner.”

“No, no, I’ll drive you.” Paddy sopped up the remains of his stew with a tranche of dark, dense bread. “I haven’t seen her move since last week.”

Shortly after, Paddy parked his car at Hurley’s Bar (est. 1864), because we could only reach the Virgin Mary’s grotto on foot. A bus idled at the side of the building and several attractive women stepped out.

“Oh, I see the girls are early tonight,” said Paddy.

“What?”

“That’s the hooker bus. They’ve been shipping in prostitutes from all over Ireland while the crowds are here to see the statue. Business is good.”

“That’s somewhat ironic, considering the event is sponsored by a virgin,” I said.

Paddy and I walked along a wide, dirt path through the forest. No moonlight could pierce the clouds or the canopy of branches and leaves interlaced above us. Hundreds (thousands?) of adults and children walked in both directions, silently. It was so dark we couldn’t see the faces of those returning from the grotto until they were very close; they had the open mouths and blank, eyes-wide stares of a zombie apocalypse. The hairs on the back of my neck danced. The trees opened to a clearing, bordered on one side by a ravine. Past the ravine was a low hill, and on the side of the hill was a life-sized, blue and white painted statue of the Virgin Mary. She would have been lost in the darkness were it not for the shimmering electric bulbs surrounding her head like a halo. Wooden stadium stands, constructed near the ravine facing the Virgin, were jammed. Hundreds of others crowded nearby, standing. A crazed-looking woman with wiry, exploding hair stood before us with a megaphone. She led the throng in a monotone recitation of the “Hail Mary” prayer like there were no spaces between the words. HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee. The crowd spoke in a spooky, robotic, my-brain-has-been-eaten tone. The prayer was repeated ten times, fifty times, without a pause at its end or beginning. There was a scuffle at the edge of the crowd as penitents jockeying for position came to blows, and two priests tried to break up the fight by threatening eternal damnation.

“See?” said Paddy, elbowing me. “See that? She just moved.” I missed it while watching the fight. I stared at the Virgin Mary but she didn’t react. I gazed harder, without blinking, like I was in a staring contest with my sister at our childhood breakfast table and the winner could punch the other in the shoulder as hard as they liked. All the while, the lights around the statue’s head flickered and wavered, and the crowd continued its pitchless mantra. I became drowsy, and fought to remain awake. I knew the statue couldn’t move, but I wanted it to move. After thirty minutes of concentration, I was ready to ask Paddy if we could go back to the pub. Sensing my weakening faith, Mary wiggled her finger, or the weird lighting wiggled her finger, or the hypnotic chanting wiggled her finger, or my sleepiness and 5 beers wiggled her finger, but I gasped just the same. Had her finger really moved? I still don’t know.

Back at the cosy, packed Hurley’s Pub, everyone was talking about the Virgin.

“I’ve seen her move her hand three times.”

“She smiled at me and nodded her head last Sunday.”

“I saw her step down from her pedestal, pick a few flowers and shake a stone out of her sandal.”

The evening ladies were plying the oldest trade. Replica statues of the Virgin, each a foot high, stood at attention on the bar, unmoving. They were for sale, along with t-shirts, keychains and snow globes of Mariolatry (a word I just learned, but you can figure it out). The GDP of Ballinspittle trebled overnight. After a couple more Guinnesses I was telling everyone the Virgin Mary had given me the finger.

Leaving Ballinspittle, I had no idea the moving statue was more than an Irish curiosity. Days later, I called Canada for my weekly check-in with my parents (texts, emails and cellphones remained in the realm of science fiction). I told my father I was still biking through Ireland, and before I could mention Ballinspittle, he asked, “Did you see the moving virgin?”

Back in Canada, I heard the Vatican closed the Ballinspittle site for a day, and surreptitiously replaced the statue with a fake. The Vatican took the moving statue on a whirlwind international tour of which Ireland was unaware. After a lucrative run of cities with huge Catholic populations, the Vatican threw the statue in a dumpster, having found a prettier, and more animated moving idol in Rio de Janeiro.

Shockingly, I have been accused of exaggerating some of my stories in the past. But I swear by the Virgin Mary that this story, coincidentally about said icon, is true.

Like A Virgin

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Posted: May 26, 2016 at 9:48 am

 

There’s Madonna, and there’s the Madonna.

On a European vacation, parents feel the compulsion to take their children into the hushed and extinguished-candle-smelling confines of major churches. Every child on a European vacation is desperate to avoid all churches. They look the same, having all been built for the same Client. Eight-year-old Devon and I stood in a darkened church alcove, at the foot of a bigger-than-life statue, under its beatific gaze.

“Dad, who’s that lady?” asked Devon.

“That’s the Virgin Mary.”

“Who’s that?” The sound you hear is Sister Theophane, approximately 115-years-old when she was my Grade Four catechism teacher, spinning in her grave.

“She’s Jesus’s mother,” I said.

“Ohhhh…that’s why you say, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ when you swear.” I saw a retired American couple, each wearing their fanny packs in the front because that’s just SO cool, look sharply in our direction. Oh, great.

“Is Joseph the dad?” asked Devon.

“Well, yes.” I paused a moment. “Uhhh, no, not really. Joseph’s not the real father because Mary’s a virgin.”

“What’s a virgin?” The backward-fanny-packers pretended to be engrossed in a nearby plaque dedicated to Saint-Somebody-of-the-Something, but each surreptitiously turned up their hearing aids.

“She gave birth to Jesus without having sex. Joseph was just the husband. Maybe they weren’t even married at the time…I’m not sure. But she didn’t have sex with Joseph until much later. Which somehow hasn’t impacted her title of ‘virgin’ for 2000 years.”

“Aw dad, do I have to know all that? Why do you always give me these long answers with too much information?”

I ignored Devon’s complaint. “Anyway, God is Jesus’s father.”

“Grandma said Jesus was God.”

“Well, he is,” I said. “But God is also the father of Jesus. It’s all a little confusing.”

“Is this why we don’t go to church on Sundays, dad?” I heard disgusted tsk-tsking from the sartorially-challenged eavesdroppers nearby.

“Something like that,” I mumbled.

Ladder of Big Dirty Words

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Posted: March 2, 2015 at 5:45 pm

 

“What makes a word a bad word, dad?” asked eight-year-old Devon. Carol had left La Pistache to take our daughter Sophie to her dance rehearsal, and Devon and I were kicking a soccer ball on the terrasse.

“Words themselves aren’t really bad,” I said. “It’s the context that makes them bad.” I pinned the ball to the ground with my foot.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You have to look at the situation and what the person saying the word means when they say it. Like if you’re in England and you say, ‘give me a fag,’ it means you want a cigarette.”

“I would never ask for a cigarette.” Devon kicked the ball from underneath my foot, and flipped it into the air in one motion of his left foot. He started juggling the ball on the top of his right foot, not letting it hit the ground.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “But if you’re in Canada and use the word ‘fag,’ which I know you would never do, it’s not very nice. Same word, different meaning. You understand what it means?”

“I heard it on the bus. But I wouldn’t say it.”

“That’s good,” I said. Devon kicked the ball through my legs, ran around me and tapped it into the net. When Devon was younger, I would let him do that. Now, I can’t stop him from doing that.

I chickened out explaining to Devon what he wanted to know, why “f*ck” was a bad word. I was less shy explaining this to my French conversation partner Céline that afternoon in Aix-en-Provence. We were speaking English at the ‘Book In Bar’ bookstore and café. We had our regular table in the front section of the store. I told her that Devon was asking about bad words. She put her sirop on the table and turned to face me.

“Okay. So what is this ‘f*ck’ thing I see everywhere?” asked Céline. “I read it everywhere. Why is everyone saying it so much?”

“Ah, well, uh, you know what the verb ‘f*ck’ means, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“Okay, so since ‘f*ck’ is related to the act of sex, then using it is a swear word, a bad word.” I saw two or three heads at adjoining tables turn our way.

“That doesn’t make sense. It’s just sex. Why is that bad?”

“You are so French,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “I agree, it’s not bad. But it’s not polite to say in English Canada. When I lived in Québec, you heard ‘f*ck’ on public television at 7:00 p.m. But all swear words in French Canada have nothing to do with sex, but the Catholic Church. If you want to cause a scandal in Québec, say ‘chalice’ to your boss or your grandmother.”

“That’s funny,” said Céline, smiling. “How could a word like ‘chalice’ be bad in Québec?”

“It all has to do with the rejection of organized religion in Québec; it’s a long story,” I said. “But I can tell you that I had my teachers laughing quite hard at my ‘Échelle des Gros Mots Sales.’ ”

“Your Ladder of Big Dirty Words?”

“I was doing a French immersion thing for six weeks in Chicoutimi Québec, and my class made a film for the school’s big concert at the end. My part of the film was teaching the English students how to swear in Québec. I made a cardboard ladder about as tall as me, with ten rungs, and on each rung I printed a swear word, starting with the mildest at the top, and the big one at the bottom – as you used the words while climbing down, increasingly sacrilegious, you descended closer to Hell. The joke was that on the other side of the ladder, the words were printed in reverse order, with the worst at the top. I explained that as you went up the ladder, using increasingly bad words, you improved your swearing. Like a true Québécois.” I pounded my chest with my fist the way I learned in Aix.

“What were the words?”

“Write these down,” I said. “This is the order I came up with, worst first, after talking to the lady I boarded with: câlisse, tabarnak, hestie, criss, viarge, sacrament, calvaire, tabarnouche, tabarslaque and tabarouette.”

Céline furrowed her brow. “I know what some of them mean, but some don’t mean anything in French.”

“Well, they don’t have to make sense. It’s all how they’re used. Strictly speaking, câlisse is the chalice on the alter. Tabarnak is a form of tabernacle, the little house on the alter that holds the chalice. Hestie is a form of hostie, the piece of bread which is Jesus. Criss is Christ. That one works in English. Viarge is the Virgin Mary. Sacrament is also the piece of bread. Calvaire is Calvary, the hill where Jesus died. The last three are milder forms of tabarnak, when tabarnak is a bit too much.”

“That seems crazy to me,” she said.

“Let me ask you this. What’s the worst thing you can say in France, something you would never say to your mother?”

“Putain,” said Céline, quietly, looking over her shoulder.

“That means prostitute. Why is that bad?”

“It just is,” she said. “The confusing part is that it’s okay to say ‘pute,’ which also means prostitute.”

“Ohhhhhhh,” I rolled my eyes. “I can see why you French think you’re so superior in the swearing department.”