The Shining Examples

Growing up Catholic on my North London street carried with it a responsibility.

As our parents were given to warn us gravely, all the neighbors knew we were Catholic (this a safe enough assumption on a corner that was regularly roused from its Sunday morning slumber by my mother’s fortissimo aria of “Oh, Our Lady and St. Joseph and all the Saints in bloody Heaven, help me find my bloody mantilla and get me to bloody, bloody Mass!”) and with that came the solemn duty for us children to comport ourselves at all times with a superhuman level of excellence, with the express end that our neighbors would think to themselves, “Hmm, those Donnelly children are well-behaved, I’d better examine this Catholic church of theirs,” and thus be converted to the One True Faith and in time admitted into a decent Catholic Heaven instead of languishing in Limbo with the other unfortunate unbaptized

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

The object of this mission would have come as something of a surprise to the family who lived next door to us, who were squeaky clean of habit, faithful of worship at the local Methodist church, and one might have supposed to have had their spiritual needs amply fulfilled; but apparently Methodism did not make the cut for salvation with our own all-powerful and ever-merciful Deity, and any exhibition of childhood misbehavior at the Donnelly end of Broomfield Avenue would be met with a sad parental shake of the head and the sorrowful observation that “I see you like to keep Heaven empty, don’t you?” Happy times.

The time when we were most conscious of being Catholic was Holy Week, the week that leads up to Easter. It was kicked off by Palm Sunday Mass, a service notable in the liturgical year in that its Gospel reading, usually a short passage recounting a parable or a passing miracle, relates the entire story of Christ’s passion, beginning with his triumphal entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week – hence the name, for the palm branches that were waved by his followers – and ending with his death by crucifixion at the end of it. For committed Christian adults, this is a sobering story and one essential to their faith. For us children, painful to report, it was simply a long one. A very long one indeed, and one that, for me, carried with it yet an additional stress, since a teacher at school had confidently informed me that, if I were able to stand without fidgeting for its entire length, then at the end of it, God would reward me by releasing a suffering soul of His choice from Purgatory and into Heaven. If I failed the test, however, that same poor suffering soul would remain in the cleansing flame until his full sentence had been served, undergoing who knew what manner of agonizing torments for who knew how many centuries more, and all because on Palm Sunday morning at St. Monica’s church, Gabrielle Donnelly had failed not to scratch her nose. Happy times, indeed.

The week grew increasingly doleful as the days passed – which was particularly unfortunate for those attempting to celebrate a birthday in late March, glumly greeted by exhortations of “Happy birthday (don’t forget it’s Holy Week)” – until we reached the supreme and sublime pinnacle of Catholic gloom that is Good Friday.

Good Friday for our family meant Stations of the Cross. Stations of the Cross is a particularly lugubrious church service during which the priest will process slowly around the series of fourteen images that line every Catholic church wall depicting the different stages of Christ’s execution, stopping at each one for a prayer, a meditation, and a faintly accusatory description of the precise nature of the torture undergone by the Son of God at that particular point in the proceedings.

To outsiders, this might seem a strange story to recount in such detail to children; but by the time we had reached church-going age, we had been told it so often and so matter-of-factly that it had simply slid in there along with all the other curious things that happened in the New Testament, such as the virgin birth, which we did not begin to understand but knew to be a big deal, and the changing of water into wine, which also caused a stir although it would have been more interesting had it instead featured fizzy orangeade, and so, at least for me, was not one fraction as frightening as the cautionary tale of Little Suck-a-Thumb, who sucked his thumbs and had them cut off, a horror which haunted my dreams for years.

These days, I quite enjoy Stations of the Cross: it includes the swooningly dolorous hymn Stabat Mater, and for a quiet hour provides respite from the increasingly daunting challenge of seeking out the positive in 21^st century life. Back then, however, the details of the service barely registered in my brain at all: I was far too preoccupied in trying to figure out where to put my knees.

While the priest moves around the church during Stations of the Cross, the congregation will follow him from their pews, standing with him as he moves from station to station, and kneeling with him when he kneels to pray, along the way rotating their bodies the entire 360 degrees of the church’s perimeter. The conundrum of how to kneel on the church kneeler while parallel with the church bench is one that befuddles me to this day.

After Stations had run its course, we would take ourselves home to face the Good Friday fast and meat-abstention. The Catholic interpretation of “fast” is what some might describe as a loose one: a little oddly, fasting Catholics are allowed regularly to interrupt their self-deprivation with the activity that can only be described as eating. They are permitted a reasonable but not excessive breakfast; a “collation” – generally agreed to be somewhere between a snack and a meal – in the middle of the day; and a reasonable but not excessive dinner at the end of it. In my younger and less greedy days, I once told my father that that was how I intended to eat on Good Friday anyway; this drove him into such an apoplexy of anger that I could only kick myself for not having thought of it earlier.

My father took his Good Friday fasting very seriously indeed. He would weigh a breakfast of two boiled eggs against three slices of buttered toast with the intensity of St. Thomas Aquinas examining a pin head for angelic dance prints; he would trap the unwary in unexpected corners of the house with furrowed brow of concern and earnest inquiry of whether the addition of a slice of tomato to his lunchtime cheese sandwich would tip it from a collation into a meal. He would even refuse dessert at dinner, yes, even when there was apple pie. “It wouldn’t feel right,” he would say, while we would draw in our breath in collective awe. When my father refused apple pie it was serious matter indeed.

My mother’s fasting style was other. A woman never widely known for the length of her emotional fuse, she would sit through Stations with eyes devoutly downcast, only to become mortally offended afterwards by some unmannerly fellow-worshiper who had insulted her on her way to the family car. They might, for instance, have said, “You’re looking well today, Mrs. Donnelly,” suggesting that her appearance did not merit acclaim on every day. They might have said, “How is your sister, Mrs. Donnelly?” communicating that her sister was more important in their eyes than was she. On a good day they might simply have said, “Hello, Mrs. Donnelly.”

Whatever had been said to her, it would have sent my mother’s sturdy and horse-healthy body into a spin of nervous prostration worthy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She would sit glowering through the journey home beneath a pitch black cloud of bitterness; once there, she would storm into the kitchen, declaring ringingly that “I’m too ill to fast!”, and set about fixing herself an invalid’s plate heaped high with bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, bread fried in the bacon grease, and a side of toast and jam, which she would demolish at the kitchen table, her grey-blue eyes as icy cold as the winter Atlantic, her every mouthful an accusation against the world in general and whichever of her children in particular were foolish enough to catch her attention.

We children, hungry and irritable from the long Lenten ban on sweets, would roam the rain-bound house – it always rained on Good Friday – attempting to dodge my mother’s ire and my father’s dietetic dilemmas alike, and inevitably falling into squabbles with each other, which as inevitably drew down upon us a speech that began with “If this is how people knew the Donnelly children behave on Good Friday …” and culminated in vast and vacant acres stretching across Heaven’s wide prairies as far as the eye could see, all of which might have been occupied by our neighbors if only we had behaved better.

The only good thing about Good Friday was that it would end at last, and that the next day would be Easter Saturday; and at noon on Easter Saturday – Hosanna! – the Lenten sacrifice ended, and the Donnelly children could eat sweets again.

And for those happy minutes while the Donnelly children munched our thitherto forbidden chocolate bars, we were released from worry about the souls of even the Presbyterians three doors down.