entered Catholic school in the late 1950s when attending Catholic school still meant corporal punishment meted out by the overworked, overwhelmed, sometimes neurotic, sometimes kindhearted, sometimes vicious, sometimes sweet, often frustrated, usually angry, always orthodox creatures known to popular culture (and even to non-Catholics) as “the nuns.”
The nuns ruled our lives inside the classroom and out. Even at home, our parents were subjected to “Sister says,” especially whenever they looked like they were about to do something about which “Sister” had expressed disapproval. We girls were supposed to wear handkerchiefs pinned to the bodices of our dresses (never, ever trousers, not even during a New York City blizzard); I never remembered to wear mine. We were supposed to complete and turn in our homework. I didn't turn in my very first homework assignment. When I told my father, who was an alcoholic, that I was supposed to write out my spelling words five times each, he tore off a corner of a brown paper grocery bag, supervised as I wrote the words, and then said, “Good,” before throwing the paper away. Try telling Sister Lurana that “I really did do my homework,” when you don't have it written down in your brand-new, uncracked, black-and-white marble composition notebook like everybody else—even Richard Conboy, the “bad” kid from the broken home. I was not off to a good start in Nun World.
The nuns instructed us each to bring a quarter in a pink envelope once a week for our tuition and to have some additional small change every day so we could buy a piece of candy from a tin held by one of the favored “monitors.” The proceeds went to “the missions” to buy a “black baby.” I often wondered how my seatmate, Frank Bilberry—who, at that time, was the blackest person I'd ever seen and whose dark-as-midnight skin fascinated this pale-as-milk little Scottish-American girl—felt about that. We were shamed when we didn't have either the pink envelope or the so-called mission money.
With such qualities as the ability to instill an almost unnaturally keen understanding of English grammar into indifferent students and with a superhuman ability to diagram sentences, as well as an enthusiastic embrace of physical punishment as a pedagogical technique, the nuns had accepted the task of teaching Catholic theology to a sixty-member class of children of wildly disparate backgrounds, intelligences, and maturity levels. To do this they used the Baltimore Catechism, a teaching guide that, as I recall, consisted of a series of questions and answers that covered just about any aspect of Roman Catholic theology. The technique was breathtakingly simple; we memorized the questions and their answers alike, so when asked a question in class, we could parrot back the proper answer. I can still recall some from memory:
Q. Who is God?
A. God is the maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible. (The part about the “invisible things” always scared me.)
Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul and made in the image and likeness of God.
Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world and be happy with Him forever in the next.
And so on.
For some children, this method of indoctrination—lockstep reductionism and rigid control of everything inside the classroom and out, from the cleanliness of one's skin, clothing, and fingernails, to the movies one might and might not see with one's parents, to forced participation in almost-constant religious “processions,” novenas, and children's masses, impersonally administered humiliations, unpredictably dispensed physical abuse, and the recitation of “horror stories” starring God's All-Stars, the martyrs—might have led to true spirituality and a love of God, although it was hard for me to see how. For others, it seemed to make no impression either way. Still others may have been irrevocably turned off to any idea of God, faith, or spirituality. For me, piled on top of the distorted ideas about God I was receiving at home from my well-intentioned mother, it created fear and anxiety, guilt and shame, a longing to know this God character, and a terrible fear of Him that existed simultaneously in my six-year-old heart and that lasted for most of my life.
During second grade, much classroom time was spent in preparing us for receiving our First Holy Communion; however, that couldn't occur until we'd all made our First Confessions. We were told that we needed to rid our young souls of all the sins we had committed during our first years of life in order to be proper receptacles for God's love, and, of course, to escape “the pains of hell,” which were described to us in exquisite detail.
Trying to explain “sin” and “repentance” to six- and seven-year-olds couldn't have been easy. So if the nuns reverted to odd analogies, who can blame them? However, because of my early religious instruction, for many years I imagined my soul as being like nothing so much as a small dish towel, floating around inside my body—white, with fringed ends. That is, it was white until I committed a sin. Then my little dish towel got stained. Sometimes it got very badly stained, but even so, there was a miraculous washday solution to the problem of sin-soiled souls: the Sacrament of Confession, which had its own terrors, but at least held the promise of salvation and relief from pain.
During and after Catholic school, I would stray from and return to my religious roots repeatedly, especially during the years of my active addiction. I never grasped the reality of my spiritual nature until I entered recovery for what I hope is the last time. I know today that my soul is nothing like a little dirty dish towel.
My recovery fellowship has become my “religion,” if by religion we can agree on a definition that includes a way of life and a set of principles, as well as a transcendent belief in a power greater than me.
In twelve-step recovery I've found my soul and a relationship with God as I understand Him today, which I see is not so far removed from the God who made me to “know Him, love Him, and serve Him,” at least until my job in this world is done.
THE SOUL WORKOUT
Pray, even thoughyou don't believe, and take actions you don't think will work.
Look at others who are walking
on a spiritual path and believethat you, too, can follow.
Be aware of thesmall miracles in your life.
Looking at the Truth of My Life
I have been a liar all my life. When I was three or four, my mother sent me to our room—we shared one, along with my father and brother, until I was almost eight—with a whack on the backside for some transgression. Today I don't even remember what it was. What I do remember is that once over the threshold, I grabbed and started to swing the bedroom door, to slam it with all my three- or four-year-old anger and might, and as I did so, stuck my tongue out at my mother as vehemently as I could. What I had failed to take into account was that on the back of the door that I was slamming was a mirror. My parents’ dresser, with its own mirrored top, stood against the opposite wall. My mother could clearly see me. I was busted by my own reflection. Fitting, wouldn't you say?
When my mother burst into the room seconds after the door slammed to confront me for my insolence, I compounded the felony by saying, with as much false innocence as I could muster (which was a lot, even back then), “I wasn't sticking my tongue out at you, Mummy! I was sticking it out at the devil! He's the one who made me be bad!” I admit,
