I don’t really understand spirituality. So I’ve taken to asking others how they define it. The answers are interesting. During a recent discussion, a colleague described it as the commitment to people, to others, and to connection. I like that: a commitment to connection. It allows the individual to decide what types of connection are most meaningful, for them. It gives space for exploration.
The recent days have had plenty of opportunity for spiritual exploring. My sole remaining uncle passed away this week, not unexpectedly but not fully scheduled either. He wasn’t much for schedules though. Sure, he kept them but Uncle H also seemed to follow a rhythm in life that was uniquely his own. His stories were the same way. He would start not at point A but instead at place K or L, and then proceed to make a tour of the alphabet in an order usually only he understood. We never knew where the story was going or when it was finished, if it did. The uncertainty added anticipation and charm to the telling.
It was not really a surprise then, at least to me, when my plans to travel to his funeral service bumped into a series of shifts and adjustments. Not blessed with my uncle’s gift for desultory gab, I will only note that I spent the hour of that service in another state and time zone – my own state and time zone. Unfortunately, physical frailty and a sleepless night prior to my planned cross-country travel contributed to last minute decision to mourn in place. A physical journey was not to be. I would seek to connect through an alternative channel.
During the pandemic, many churches and spiritual congregations learned how to use online tools for remote participation in services. Although no information about this option for attending the funeral was available, I decided I would try anyway, just in case the recently organized service in a small parish church for a pleasantly memorable man was perhaps live-streamed. I went online, early enough, then remembered a text I had received the previous day from my aunt. “The priest says he knows you,” she said. That seemed odd because I’ve never lived near that church’s community. But then she mentioned, in her text, that the connection was from grade school, a school I’d attended in another state. I recognized the name of the priest, vaguely at first, yet no image of face or childhood tale surfaced from the tattered mental flip charts and fragmented internal photo albums that make up my memory store.
It’s sad to forget so much. The thought took me, quickly, onto the various bicycles and school buses of my youth, speeding through old neighborhoods, school yards, and classrooms. He was there, I could sense him, just out of focus. But I couldn’t see him, not distinctly, not in a rickety parochial school desk, or a basketball game bench, or the line to get a pretzel after recess. Thinking of those pretzels reminded me how, after tearing around for thirty minutes atop a half-paved, half-grass-and-dirt patch of recess we would return to the classroom, slump atop sticky wooden desks, and wonder how we were going to explain the latest tear or stain in the gray pants that were standard school uniform. Lunch was over, our energies were spent, and there were still three hours of school left. Some older kids, boys who somehow were chosen to work for the school cafeteria, would appear at the back door of our classroom, yell “extra milk!”, and anyone with a dime for a milk or juice carton, or a nickel for a pretzel, would race to the back of the room, straining to see what was left, hoping that the kids whose seats were closest to the back door didn’t have any money or hunger that day. Boys sat on one side of the classroom, girls on the other. Because my name was toward the top of the alphabet, I always sat toward the front of class, and so had a longer way to go. It didn’t matter much though because I almost never had any money or, if I did, I often lost it somewhere out “there”, out beyond the fogged windows of the classroom, playing a frenzied game of “jail jail”. If you’ve never played “jail jail”, you probably won’t understand why white shirts and grey pants can get tears in them so often. You also may not get why, no matter how much lunch had been stuffed into the metal lunch box I brought to school, I could be really hungry or thirsty so soon after eating it. It bears noting that, despite my small frame, I used to eat a lot as a kid. We went through loafs of white Wonder bread in our house like they grew on trees. Obviously things that grow on trees are in abundance because all sorts of comparisons and references were made to such trees during my youth. Bread, money, new grey pants – none of them grew on trees, as my brother and I were reminded frequently by our mother when she was either making a pile of bologna sandwiches, searching for nickels and dimes in her purse, or trying to sew another hole in the knees of a grey pair of pants.
Isn’t it odd how we called pants a pair? Two legs sure. Two pockets that often sprang holes. But there was only one waist. You pulled the pants on through the same waist band. One zipper and one clasp. Language is strange that way, I guess.
The orange juice boxes were rare. If you were first to the back of the class room, and you were quick of eye and reach, you had a chance at grabbing the last one, assuming there were any left by the time the “extra milk” container was brought to the back door of the class room. Those of us with dimes would slip our heads into the crook of our arms, pretending to be deep in thought about the class lesson, one eye and ear cocked toward the back door and hallway. If it was hot outside, the door was usually open so that a breeze could waft through the room. That was nice, in the spring and end of summer, because classrooms without air conditioning could get really hot, especially after one or more students had made a heroic final dash through the crowded school yard, dodging and weaving students of all the years, hiding behind this group and that, trying to sneak and squirt through the scattered defense of the enemy team and tag the stretched fingers at end of the line of kids who were stuck in jail and needed to be -“RELEASE!”.
Some schools may have called the game “Caughty, Caught, Caught”, I’m not sure.
Extra milk, even chocolate, from a small wax carton was never the best, in my view, because it had been out of the refrigerator over the lunch period and didn’t have that crisp clean edge to it when you gulped it down. Even if a had a dime, and even if I made it to the back door of the classroom in time to have a chance at a choice, I could never bring myself to waste a whole dime on a soggy carton of whole milk with beads on moisture running down its sides, if all the orange juice was gone or what remained looked like it was seeping out of the seals of the waxed cardboard containers. If that happened, I would just sulk my way back to my desk, stuff my shirt back into my pants, and try not to listen to the sighs of satisfaction from other kids who had gotten extra juice or liked extra milk.
You may wonder how this relates to the church, its website, and Uncle H’s funeral service? Well the priest for the service was to be a former elementary school classmate, as I’ve said. He would then remember the cry of “extra milk!”, the noise of the school yard and the clanging bell ending recess, the game of “Jail Jail”, and the plight of the overheated student who desperately wanted a coolish carton of orange juice. Besides, viewed online, the priest’s contemporary parish seems similar to ours from over fifty years ago, long before we knew anything about “online”, as much in the parish’s humble attitude if not its physical form. The website announces summer work that is underway on clean-up, renovations, and various activities to ready the church and school for the new academic year. The parish also needs funds to help with that work. It seems little has changed over the decades.
The name of the parish led me on a series of internet learnings regarding a miraculous image of Mary and the Christ child. The priest’s story seemed equally magical. Only during his mid-life, following the sad death of his wife, did he decide to become a priest. His children had supported this decision. Now that news stopped me; I didn’t know that people who had been married were permitted to become ordained. I should say men, and not people, because women are still not able to become priests, another example of how some things remain the same in the Catholic Church. This priest’s story is fascinating. I tracked it across a series of websites once I put his full name into the search bar. They say we still look like ourselves, years later. I could maybe make out the face of a ten year-old classmate inside the photos I found of the priest following his ordination, his family surrounding him. That classmate still fell into the nebulous cloud of something labelled grade school, however, in the jumbled visual files of my mental past. Could he have been my brother’s classmate and not mine?
I think married men and women should be able to be ordained. I doubt I will live long enough to see this occur. Sooner or later though, Catholicism is going to have to face this reality.
Alas, my journey into this church and its priest, while interesting, had passed most of the time of my uncle’s service. I was not there, which saddened me. And nowhere in all of the webpage clicks and views had I seen a link for a livestream to Uncle H’s funeral. Resigned to the reality that the service was happening without me, I turned to my daily spiritual reflection, a series of internet-based readings and brief meditative inquiries, complete with gentle background music. That’s when I noticed a short email from my aunt, sent just hours earlier, telling me that the service for my uncle was available via livestream. What? I tried a new series of searches, with different keywords. This time I found it. Quickly, I joined the livestream, only to see the priest tidying up the altar and hear the echoing sounds of people leaving the church. In minutes, the livestream showed an empty church and altar. Then the stream ended.
“Has anything disturbed you today, even slightly?” That was the question I was asked to contemplate during the seven minute examen that I listened to immediately following my dismayed realization that I might have joined the service online after all. “Be with that”, I was gently advised. “Share with God what you are noticing.” “What do you need to help you live well?”
Words failed me. Nonetheless, I reached for some. It is said that spirit is what you feel when you aren’t trying to impress yourself with your own sense of spirit. Who said that I don’t know. Perhaps it was me, just now. Regardless, I felt sad and more than a little guilty. I felt I had let my uncle down, failed to represent my uncle’s pre-deceased brothers (my father and other uncle), and simply not shown sufficient fortitude in attending Uncle H’s service, in person or online. What did I need to help me live well? As I started into a spiral of self-doubt, my eye caught sight of a seated Buddha, positioned above a wardrobe in the bedroom. Usually facing directly outward, this morning the Buddha was turned slightly, seemingly angled specifically at me. “Too much ego,” my mom used to say about humans. The seated Buddha held a posture and poise which seemed completely at one with my mom and her observation. Too much ego. Optional worry and suffering. Unhealthy attachment.
My uncle always had a smile on his face. In photo after photo, he sports a host of grins and expressions. However, he almost always looked in a direction different than the lens of the camera, as if he saw something that inevitably grabbed his attention just as the photographer captured the image. It makes a person holding or considering one of his pictures wonder what was happening off-screen. All that off-screen activity seemed, as remarkable as this may sound, to be suddenly alive in the twelve feet of open air connecting the quiet Buddha atop the bedroom wardrobe and my request for help to live well.
“Extra milk!” I had made it to the back of the class room in time, could see a single tear-dripped carton of cool orange juice balanced atop a jumble of milk cartons. A dime from my mother turned in my fingers, connected to a yearning in my core for understanding, acceptance. Maybe I had attended the right service this morning after all.