I’m in the process of collecting my Lenten reading materials — this year I’m going to make a deep dive into the Rule of St. Benedict (which I, bad Benedictine, have been neglecting) and some other books, but I’m thinking I might actually reread my own Little Sins Mean a Lot. That’s not because of ego, but because I very frequently forget what I have written, and while looking for something in my files, came across this chapter, which I read thinking… “yeah… yeah, you gotta work on this, still!”
From Chapter 7, on Gloominess and Griping:
“Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” –Luke Skywalker, Star Wars: A New HopeMy mother resided on one of those dark planets. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate both the lunacy and the sorrow that launched her toward it, and this appreciation colors my memories of her with a kind of rueful humor. In truth, in the twenty years since her death, I’ve felt closer to her than I ever did in life, especially when I recognize in myself some of her habitual gripes and grouchy expressions emanating from my own mouth.
One of my strangest memories is of my mother telling me to make sure she was buried with her communion pin and prayer book, and that if I forgot, she would come back to haunt me.
I was four years old, at the time.
Even at that tender age, I accepted that people and pets lived and died, but I hadn’t yet worked out that “people” included my parents. That reality struck me as I sat on the basement steps, watching my father play the piano. He was a very fine musician, but – owing to a disagreement between his own parents as to whether he should study the piano or the violin — he never studied, and couldn’t read a note of music. This deficiency accorded him a measure of humiliation all his life, and kept him from calling himself a musician, but he could play any instrument he picked up, and was particularly impressive at the keyboard.
Watching him play that afternoon, I sensed the joy he took in making music, and I think I also sensed his melancholy. In that moment, at that young age, I had no way of expressing an interior knowledge so secret and so harsh — that music, for him, would forever entrap him within a dichotomy of pleasure and pain.
Unable to articulate it, all I could do was bawl. I watched him play, understood something for which I had no words, and – deciding that it all had something to do with love and death – became incredibly emotional; I worked myself up into a fine hysterical frenzy that scared my father’s hands from the keyboard and sent my mother running, demanding to know what was the matter.
“I don’t want Daddy to die!” I wailed and gasped. “And I don’t want you to die!”
“We’re not dying!”
That meant nothing to me; I was howling, by now, and beginning to hyperventilate, as I pronounced sentence upon my parents. “But you will, someday! Someday you’re both going to die!”
My mother, way out of her league in terms of consolation, and looking for anything she could use to put an end my disordered freak, said, “you gotta stop thinking about it; it’s bad for your veins!”
Longtime readers know that my mother was a real character who, from the moment of my birth, I never fully understood. Moms can be like that. I’m sure my kids don’t get me, either.
Which is why we all need to learn about mercy — how to give it and how to receive it, too!
For Lent I’m going to work on all that, and my Little Sins, as I look through it, has advice and prayers that I should take and use. Maybe you’ll want to, too! Lenten reading should challenge us and instruct, but that doesn’t mean it can’t entertain, as well!
