The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [39]
Before I had language, I’d had the most intense engagement of my life, a frustration I contend with by writing. Had I been rejected from heaven? Surely I was poor enough to make it, then, all the way through the needle’s eye. It was a Catholic hospital, and my mother tells me that the nurses—mostly nuns in those days, Sisters of Charity—loved to hold me. Surely they were praying; one of them may have baptized me in secret. My mother came every day as well, to hold me and to sing. It was my mother, and the nuns, the surgeon, and the nurse who fed me a bottle all through the operation—these people working helplessly, with all their hope and skill—who called me back. It was their world I learned to want, like a Dorothy who, having seen Oz, can call Kansas home.
For me, for years afterward, there were nightmares, and screaming fits induced by motor noises and lights that triggered memories of my hospital stay. Once, when my favorite baby-sitter, a maternal teenager named Lillian, came to the house dressed all in white I had such a tantrum that she went home and changed. My mother says that my eyes seemed sad to her when I was a baby, sadder and older than those of other children. And when I first encountered the words “eschatology” and “teleology,” reading Kierkegaard at the age of sixteen, I looked them up in the dictionary and knew they were mine in a way most words were not.
Today, we are baptizing our little nephew. He’s seven months old, chubby, thoroughly healthy. Ever since we came here for Christmas, I’ve listened for him in the morning. Like the birds, he begins to sing at first light, and together, they make the most joyous music—the baby, the birds—cooing and calling, as if life depended on it. We’ve planned the ceremony for late in the afternoon of Epiphany, at home, after our two ministers—my brother (Disciples of Christ) and his wife (Episcopalian) have returned from their church duties.
The baby’s tired and cranky, he has no way of knowing that we are passing through hell. We renounce the forces of evil, and he cries out. As the godmother, I am holding him, and he’s fussy, squirming; I have to hold on tight:
Our words wash over you, and you brush them away. The candle catches your eye, your mother’s hair and fingers transparent in its light. You want the candle, you want the food your mother has become for you, you want to go down into this night at her breast. Poor little baby, water on your hair, chrism on your forehead, dried milk on your chin. Poor, dear little baby; hold on.
THE PARADOX
OF THE PSALMS
Pain—is missed—in Praise
—Emily Dickinson
Church meant two things to me when I was little: dressing up and singing. I sang in choirs from the time I was four years old and for a long time believed that singing was the purpose of religion, an illusion that was rudely swept away by the rigors of catechesis. Church was also a formal affair, a matter of wearing “Sunday best” and sitting up straight. Like the girl in Anne Sexton’s “Protestant Easter, 8 years old ” I knew that “when he was a little boy / Jesus was good all the time,” and I made a confused attempt to connect his story with what I saw around me on Sunday morning: “They pounded nails into his hands. / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats . . . / The important thing for me / is that I’m wearing white gloves.”
I have lately realized that what went wrong for me in my Christian upbringing is centered in the belief that one had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to meet God, the insidious notion that I need be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in “His” church. Such a God was of little use to me in adolescence, and like many women of my generation I simply stopped going to church when I could no longer be “good,” which for girls especially meant not breaking rules, not giving voice to anger or resentment, and not complaining.
Not surprisingly, given their disruptive tone, their bold and incessant questioning