a faith for grown-ups: a midlife conversation about what really matters
DESCRIPTION
Returning Catholics—those who drifted away from the faith but are now interested in coming back—are sure to find A Faith for Grown-Ups a most helpful resource as they try to reconnect with the faith as adults. With great wit and keen understanding, author Robert Lockwood explores the common experience of growing up Catholic from the 1950s through the 1970s and invites fallen-away Catholics to return to the Catholic faith and experience an adult spirituality, rich in meaning.TRANSCRIPT
c o n t e n t s Introduction: A Story, Not an Argument vii
1 When All Was Right with the World 1
2 A Little Help from My Friends 27
3 In the Beginning 45
4 Travels with Luke 67
5 Here Comes the Sun 89
6 Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall 105
7 Visiting O’Toole’s Bar 125
8 Holy Ed and Other Eccentrics 151
9 Like a Bridge over Troubled Water 173
10 Amazing Grace 193
11 A Song for the Asking 219
12 The Great Life 245
13 The Only Living Boy in New York 269
14 The Tavern at the End of the World 289
Acknowledgments 302
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What is a mystery?
A mystery is a truth which we cannot fully understand.
The kid heading toward me had that seedy look. A line flashed
in my head, like something from an old Ray Chandler mys-
tery: “He could spit fear.” I don’t know what that meant exactly, but
it fit the moment.
I was out for an evening walk with the dog. I never thought
the time would come when I would consider a stroll through the
neighborhood exercise, but that’s what happens as the hair gets
grayer and the waistline stretches. All the exercise and all the fad
diets can’t combine to beat the years, though men in particular like
to think so. A diet to start next Monday, a few weeks of sit-ups and
[ c h a p t e r 1 ]
When All Was Right with the World
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we’ll be thirty again. Of such things great lies are built over a rare
steak and a cold beer.
The kid wore a baseball cap brim backward and a floppy old
jacket hanging low in the night drizzle. Baggy tan pants and black
sneakers finished the sartorial splendor. When he finally walked
past harmlessly, I let out a little breath and sucked the night air in
deeply.
What was that smell? When he went by, he left a brief but
very distinct odor, like a cigar burning in a mattress. No, it wasn’t
an illegal substance. It was something else. I racked my brain, the
memory triggered like hearing an old song on the radio. Something
from the past. As if to help the memory, my thighs began to itch
in sympathy.
And suddenly I was back. Twenty-four eleven-year-old boys sit-
ting on one side of the aisle of Christ the King Church in Yonkers,
New York. Thirty-two girls in blue jumpers and skirts are across
from us. It’s a rainy March morning and we have trekked in from
various parts of the neighborhood to begin a Lenten school day
with prayer and devotions. Nobody got a ride to school in 1959.
Buses were for the public-school kids. The Old Man had the car
anyway, and nobody was rich enough for two cars. If it rained you
were outfitted in hat and rubbers. Puddles formed under the pews,
mixing in with about a thousand coats of pine wax to create its own
unique aroma. But that wasn’t what I had just smelled.
Wet corduroy pants!
Take fifteen mangy mutts, soak, and they don’t smell nearly as
bad as one pair of wet corduroy pants. Our blue corduroy pants
were part of the school winter uniform, worn for extra warmth.
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W h e n a l l W a s r i g h t W i t h t h e W o r l d
The fall and spring pants were made of some thin faux substance
that tore in the knees if they got a whiff of the asphalt of a Catholic
school playground. But we took them any day over the corduroys
that introduced us to a lifetime of jock itch. Years later and we’re
still scratching. The blue pants went with the white shirts and
blue ties with the “CK” logo stitched on them in white, though by
March most of us would have colored that over in blue ink from our
fountain pens in an act of desperate boredom during arithmetic.
With the stench of corduroy overpowering the lingering smell
of incense, hundreds of us jammed into the pews, class by class, for
a Lenten prayer service during which we would be reminded that
each of our sins pressed a thorn deeper into the forehead of Christ.
That “told-a-lie-twice” that we rattled off in the confessional on
Saturday afternoons was not some small affair. It was part of an
eternal understanding. The knowledge that Christ died for our
sins was explained very personally. This was not sin in the abstract.
Christ did not suffer solely for what Hitler and Stalin had done;
He suffered because you clobbered your little brother for touching
your stuff and because you talked in line yesterday afternoon when
heading back to class after recess.
Bookshelves are filled with baby-boomer recollections of grow-
ing up in the postwar Catholic Church in the years prior to and just
after the Second Vatican Council. Some are funny, others are des-
perate. Most are cynical. It is a curiosity that, as far as I know, there
are no fictionalized memoirs of growing up in a public elementary
school at the same period. Stuff like Blackboard Jungle doesn’t count
because the theme was “juvenile delinquents” in high school, rather
than the allegedly stultifying atmosphere of elementary school.
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That was an age where every kid feared the neighborhood “JDs”
and we were warned that if we followed a certain disreputable path,
we would end up with “JD cards.” I never saw a JD card, though there
were more than enough juvenile delinquents where I hung around.
The difference, of course, between the public-school environ-
ment and the parochial schools was that central linking of faith and
education. Arithmetic was just arithmetic over at Public School
16 in my neighborhood. At Christ the King—and thousands of
Catholic grammar schools across the country—arithmetic was only
a part of the whole. There was a thread intertwining with spelling,
geography, history, and reading that held it all together. It was our
faith. Our Catholicism was never confined to the religion class
that usually started the morning’s education. It was not solely the
prayers that would mark the transition of one class to the next, the
Angelus at Noon (when kids would freeze in place at the sound of
the church bells: “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. And
she conceived of the Holy Ghost. Hail Mary, full of grace-.-.-. ”), the
saints days celebrated, the steady pace of the liturgical year from
September through June. The faith pervaded every moment of the
day, making phonics not merely a drudge of endless sounding-out,
but a part of the eternal cosmos: “When you see WH together,”
Sister explained, “it produces a ‘whe’ sound, as in whip. Like the
WHips that lashed Jesus on Good Friday.” Public school kids back
then were being introduced to a vague and flattened civic religion
that identified George Washington with a White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant culture, as bland as an Episcopalian box social. Even the
Jewish kids weren’t offended. It was a white-bread experience without
texture or taste that no one bothers to recall. Love it or hate it,
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W h e n a l l W a s r i g h t W i t h t h e W o r l d
accept it or reject it, praise it or blame it, no one who experienced
eight years of Catholic grammar school in the 1950s, 1960s, or
early 1970s could find it forgettable. I mean, their school was
named after a number. Our school was named Christ the King.
And that can be the essential problem. The grammar-school
experience of those three decades was so inextricably bound to the
faith that one is simply identified with the other. When the nun
told us that Jesus was disappointed that we spoke in class, she was
playing an ace to maintain her sanity, not trying to present the
Catholic faith. Too many of us have never much gone past it. Most
of what a generation or two identified with Catholicism was a nun’s
attempt to exercise crowd control over a bunch of kids more inter-
ested in being home watching Three Stooges reruns. It was a childish
presentation of the faith for childish minds. No harm done, except
if we never get past that.
That said, there was something clearly overwhelming in the faith
of our youth. And therein lies the contradiction. The faith some of
us avoid now has little to do with the faith as it is to be lived and
known as an adult. Yet, at the same time, that introduction to the
faith in the church of our childhood was powerful. It lingers with
us. Kenneth Woodward, religion editor at Newsweek for many
years, described Catholicism—and particularly the Catholicism
of a baby boomer’s youth—as a sensual religion. By that he didn’t
mean sexy. God forbid. When I graduated in 1963 from grammar
school, I couldn’t be screwed-up by sex. Sex hadn’t been invented
yet. Woodward meant that it was an experience that appealed to
each of the senses. As the smell of wet corduroy can put me back
in a cramped pew in Yonkers, New York, four decades earlier, there
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a faith for grown-ups
A Midlife Conversation about What Really Matters[ ]
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robert p. lockwood is director of communications for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. He was president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing and writes the popular “Catholic Journal” column in Our Sunday Visitor.
“[Lockwood helps] us to recognize what a truly adult Catholic faith looks like as we move into middle age and beyond.”
—Greg Erlandson, president, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing
“A delightful revisiting for baby boomers, a ‘faith-story’ as witnessed, and now explained, by one of its own.”
—Owen McGovern, executive director, Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada
religion/catholicism $17.95
In this call to a generation, Robert Lockwood argues that many middle-aged Americans with a Catholic upbringing are spiri-tually trapped. They experience adult religious longings, yet
they have a hard time taking the faith of their childhood seriously. Catholics of a certain age confuse the powerful imagery of a van-ished Catholic world of the 1950s and 1960s—nuns in long black habits, the crisp questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism, Saturday confession—with the Catholic faith itself.
With wit and keen understanding, in a narrative rich with anec-dotes, Lockwood invites disconnected and passive Catholics to encounter a faith for grown-ups: one that is richer, stronger, and more satisfying than the fleeting images of a bygone Catholic era. It is a faith rooted in the Jesus of the gospels, safeguarded by two thousand years of tradition and reflection—a faith with answers to the questions adults ask.
rob e r t p. l oc k wood