Blue Sky Dream (31 page)

“The people I talked to after this tape had been distributed were horrified,” says my father. “They were very depressed. These were early to midcareer people in their thirties and forties with families and mortgages and skills and energy. And they had an interest in staying with the business, because
they were in it so deep.
”

My father, who is still laughing bleakly and shaking his head as the tape finishes rewinding, will be spared the horrified depression
of his friends, however, for he is one who finally did achieve conversion (of a personal kind, at least). Two years before, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company had invited my father to take early retirement. He had accepted. Get out of it now, my father told himself. Cut your losses.

TEN
 OUR LADY OF IRONY
 

Q
ueen of Apostles has a new Jacuzzi. You can’t miss it there just to the left of the altar—waist-high concrete tub full of chlorinated, heated holy water; small fountains burbling at four corners; bottom inlaid with tile crosses; stainless steel filtration vents. State-of-the-art baptismal fonts like this don’t come cheap—high five figures—but most of the flock cheerfully paid. The look of their church was tired—early Perry Mason set, cinderblock and river rock and knotty pine. It needed … 
pizzazz
; time to redecorate! Besides, as He Himself put it: Water is Life. Except when it’s not. Like when some little kid falls unnoticed into one of the neighborhood’s swimming pools. Which explains why, between baptism dunkings, a perfectly clear Plexiglas lid, resistant to all potential lawsuits, seals off the surface of this most sacred of spas.…

There. See what I’ve done? I return to the church where my mother still worships, where she still asks her saints to be good to a son in his thirties, and these are the whispers that swarm my
head, scribble themselves in my notebook. If you find them funny or blasphemous or both, imagine them a different way. Read them as a prayer, a furtive little prayer by one who long ago abandoned his Catholicism to become an Ironic Fundamentalist.

W
e make, I suspect, an all too common set, my mother and me at Mass this Sunday in the middle of Silicon Valley in the middle of the 1990s. She is the mother who thanks God for her good life in the suburbs, and I am the son whose good life in the suburbs convinced me I did not need a God. She is the mother who offered her children Catholicism as a connection to heaven, and I am the son who placed his faith, instead, in ironic detachment.

I could offer the usual explanations. I could blame the ironic reflex in me, so quick and caustic, on the false promise of blue sky suburbia, the picture of progress offered me as a child that is today so laughably “retro.” I could say that, in these media-manipulated times, irony proves me smarter than television, more wily than advertising, a thinking individual rather than a mass consumer. I could admit (most truthfully, probably) that I am insecure; I dread the embarrassment of misplaced sincerity, of playing the dupe. For whatever reason, there are enough people like me that we are now said to be living in the Age of Irony, a time when it is hip to place “air quotes” around sweetly earnest ideas like faith and community and the soul and the sacred.

Just when I began placing air quotes around God and the Virgin Mary and the religion my mother wanted me to have, I am not sure. I recall no agonizing crisis of faith. I did not so much lose my Catholicism as casually shrug it off, leaving it there in the pews like a forgotten sweater on a warm California Sunday. This may have begun as early as age ten or eleven, when my mother would fret over whether to let me eat a hamburger on a Friday (then still forbidden) and I’d crack, “Oh, Mom! Nobody’s going to hell on the meat rap!” When I put it that way, she could not
help but laugh along with me. I know that, barely a teenager, I listened to the catchy new folk hymns meant to evoke sweet earnestness in me, and I was glad for so soft a target for my sarcasm.
Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya … Yeah, right.

I know that by the time I was attending Catholic high school, mine were the surlier expiations of an Ironic Fundamentalist. One dull afternoon I wandered into the chapel with a few friends (one of whom intended to become a priest) and, with no one else around, I suddenly waggled my middle finger in a fuck you salute to the Christ on the wall. My startled friends searched my face. Was I angry at God or just sure He was dead? Would I pretend such a vulgar atheism just for a laugh? Or was my point that
my
God, a profoundly un-Catholic God, was so impossible to offend that He laughs back?

I left it to them to decide. I didn’t bother to explain it even to myself for I had accomplished my only aim, which was to puncture the dullness of that afternoon with my new plaything, my ever-sharpening sense of irony. If I was reckless with my recent discovery, it was only because I was so very pleased with it. For how could you be caught inside a banal moment if you also stood outside of it, always poised to destabilize it? How, for that matter, could you be trapped in a banal self if you hovered above your own life, suspended upon layers and layers of ironic detachment? That, to me, was the saving power of irony. Staring back at my friends in the quiet of the chapel, still flipping off Jesus, I waited for a wave of remorse to well up in the former altar boy. But waves of feeling, when filtered through layers of irony, have a way of flattening into a confusion of small, ignorable ripples.

These many years later I must confess that I lack, still, a sinner’s guilt for having shrugged off Catholicism. And yet here I am, sitting next to my mother at Mass, here to sample the Catholicism of Queen of Apostles today, a Catholicism that is attracting the return of many a fallen-away son and daughter of the blue sky suburbs. This Mass, I have been told by my mother, is the most popular one for miles around. The pastor who packs them in is Father James Mifsud—Father Jim as he likes to be
called—a bald, compact man who grew up in a big working-class family on the rough side of San Francisco, a priest who lifts weights every morning and who proudly proclaims that his Jesus “is not some wimpy guy with no muscles,” a priest who has made himself welcome in the dugout of the Giants baseball team and the locker room of the football 49ers. Father Jim’s famous sermons have, in fact, the flavor of a rousing locker-room harangue, peppered as they are with swear words and shouts of encouragement and even the occasional ironic joke.

“My mother taught me: Every time you lie, blue lines come into your forehead.” Over a flutter of chuckles, Father Jim’s voice swells.

“I said to her, ‘Blue lines? What blue lines?’

She said, ‘Only your mother can see the blue lines.’ So. I grew up learning not to lie … 
because my mother lied about those blue lines!
”

Grateful laughter pours forth from his audience, including me, as I absorb the latest modernization of a church interior that once seemed so modern. How much brighter and more streamlined Father Jim has made Queen of Apostles by installing racks of track lighting and by painting white over all the knotty pine and cinderblock. The altar has been lowered and moved forward so as to make the Mass (as Father Jim explained when he did it) more democratic, more a celebration of community. The enormous, agonized Christ who once hung on His Cross on the back wall has been spirited away. The bared space is used for projecting words to hymns so that all can sing along accompanied by whatever image of God each prefers to keep in one’s head.

“Everybody,” thunders Father Jim, “is welcome here.”

Everybody is welcome in the community of fragmented opinion that American Catholicism has become. An “attitude problem” as
Newsweek
put it, grips a Church “honeycombed with groups who want more: the democratic election of bishops, optional celibacy for priests, a declaration of rights for dissenting theologians and blessings on monogamous gay marriages.” Two thirds of American Catholics say the Church is wrong to oppose
birth control, the same percentage thinks women should be priests, and even more are for ordaining married men.

One in ten Catholics told a
New York Times
survey they rarely if ever pray privately. One in eight said that to be a good Catholic one needn’t even believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Almost two thirds of American Catholics, and half of regular churchgoers, dare to see the central sacred ritual of Catholicism, the Eucharist, as a symbolic flourish. Apparently, in the communion line of Queen of Apostles Mass, there are many who answer
Amen
to the declaration
Body of Christ
, all the while placing air quotes around their assent.

Father Jim sidesteps all these fault lines by fashioning a community around what his flock shares: a sense of the grip slipping. Father Jim speaks not to the old future I grew up with, but to the latest one, the future that won’t let you take a thing like progress for granted, the future that makes you wonder all the time whether you are good enough to hack it. “You are better,” goes one of Father Jim’s favorite pronouncements, “than you think you are!”

“Never Give Up!” goes another. Outside, draped above the church entrance, a vinyl red on white banner proclaims
Never Give Up!
This has become the public theme of Queen of Apostles parish, visible to anyone driving by. It is printed on signs handed out for free.
Never Give Up!
It is emblazoned on the parish bulletins in every pew.
Never Give Up!
It is urged by Father Jim in his pulpit on the day I am there to hear.
Never Give Up!

I look around at the sea of people who have come to hear this exhortation at a time when the blue sky dream is being downsized. A surprising number seem to be like me, soft and white and in their thirties, dressed in their casual Sunday best. I hear Father Jim demand that all of us pray together, for each other, loudly and with feeling, the way a community would. Someone stands and says, “For a special friend with a drinking problem.”
Lord, hear our prayer
, we all answer. Someone says, “For my sister who’s having legal problems.”
Lord, hear our
prayer
. “For Dad’s speedy recovery from a stroke.”
Lord, hear our prayer.
“That those who are unemployed may seek work with faith, hope, and patience.”
Lord, hear our prayer.

Later, as I listen to my mother sing her hymns so happily and charmingly off key, as the Mass nears an end, I realize that a moment I have been vaguely dreading is at hand. It comes when my mother stands to join the line receiving Holy Communion and I remain seated in the pew, drawing my legs in to let her pass by.

Regardless of what
New York Times
surveys say, the Church teaches that through the priest God literally transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, so that to take Communion is to participate in a fresh, recurring miracle. My mother is one of those Catholics who still believe in this miracle. I, of course, cannot. And so, Christmases, Easters, every Holy Communion brings the same dilemma. If I were to follow my mother into line, say
Amen
to the priest’s
Body of Christ
, swallow the wafer, and squeeze my eyes shut, would I be telling my mother what she hopes is true, that I am, at least, wishing to believe? Or would I simply be dishonoring her own authentic belief? Each time, I wonder this. Always I have chosen to remain behind and sit and leaf through a hymnal with my head down, like a criminal suspect not wanting to be noticed.

This Sunday morning at Queen of Apostles is no different. Except this time, as my mother makes her way up the aisle toward the body and blood of Christ, I do not find the usual solace in detached irony. I begin to imagine my ironic sensibility as a gremlin who sits on my shoulder and whispers dirty things into my ear. I see my mother take Communion, have her miracle, and I think: What if the essence of an ironic life, the striving to live both inside the moment and outside of it, is merely to live twice removed? What if, instead, I had managed to hold fast to the Catholicism that everyone around me in church seems to have kept, somehow, on their own terms? How must it be, to stare at that sparkling new baptismal font and not see a Jacuzzi?