i.
True story: my sister, during her junior or senior year at Boston University, called to talk about what I didn’t yet realize was a classic college cliché, disguised as revelation (at least one that would seem obligatory for those raised in the Catholic church). While walking through the mean-ish streets near her off-campus apartment, she saw another in a series of anonymous citizens, sleeping in a bag between two buildings while the winter snow fell (a view often described as beautiful for those watching it from the safe side of a window).
“You know,” she said with the earnestness of a twenty-year-old as I listened with the innocence of a sixteen-year-old. “That could be Jesus, and everyone just walks past him. That’s his test for us, and all of us, thinking we’re such good Christians, and… (Rest of story not necessary because OBVI.)
Flash forward a few years, where your humble narrator finds himself a college sophomore. The most important musical influence in my admittedly sheltered world was Ian Anderson (also known as the leader of Jethro Tull). Aqualung, an album I’d loved for years, somehow took on new levels of import and resonance as I struggled to reconcile the way things ought to be and the way they were (did I mention I was a sophomore?). Whatever your appetite (and/or allergy to) prog-rock, Aqualung remains a remarkably ambitious –and successful– attempt to look at the racket religion has degenerated into (or was it always thus?). After getting some licks in on the clergy, Anderson turns both barrels on the men who have sought to create a convenient God in their own image. Pretty sophomoric stuff, eh? Well, that’s partly the point, but what’s remarkable is that these songs have lost none of their power or perspicacity.
It still sounds pretty audacious today, but was downright defiant to pen tunes like this in 1971 (check out “My God,” and “Hymn 43,” which includes the incendiary couplet “If Jesus saves, he better save himself/From the gory glory seekers who’ll use his name in death). In just one-minute Anderson nails, for all time, the opportunistic hypocrisy of the materially rich but spiritually depraved amongst us who compensate (figuratively) for their nagging consciences in the confessional or in the collection basket (“And you press on God’s waiter your last dime/As he hands you the bill”). But on the literal levels, these are the people we all know: our peers, parents and especially our politicians, and Anderson sardonically nails these weekend warriors to their crosses of gold.
He saves the best for last, when in “Wind Up” he recalls being shipped off to church, eventually concluding that God is “not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.”
In your pomp and all your glory you’re a poorer man than me/As you lick the boots of death born out of fear.
I’ll decline to further recall how profound those lyrics seemed to a nineteen year old, but I’ll argue they retain their poetic import even now. Of course one comes to an age where they can see through the self-serving charade and the fake humility and the sickening appropriation of the holy for personal, earthly gains. Et cetera. But this sort of material goes several steps beyond fighting the power or endorsing the punk rock anarchy; it’s something like gospel for a young sensitive soul, alienated by everything and earnestly (sensitive souls are nothing if not earnest) looking for Truth with a capital T.
ii.
All of which is to say, I was born into it, and I still feel fortunate to recall that most of my memories (as a weekly churchgoer in general and as an altar boy in particular) are, if not totally positive, most definitely not negative, or harmful.
The theme of faith (having it, losing it, securing belief in something bigger and better, etc.) inevitably resurfaces throughout my memoir Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone. Here’s a real life memory that informed a piece of short fiction I’d write many years later. An excerpt, below.
***
As an altar boy, he would occasionally be called on to serve a wedding and, less frequently, a funeral. Weddings of course were preferable: happy events, pretty women, typically a few dollars for his trouble. The funerals, obviously, were different in almost every way.
“Listen to the words,” his father told him as he prepared, with ambivalence, for his first funeral mass. “It’s actually a very beautiful service.”
Incredibly, his old man was correct. The mass, while somber, also included much of the love and grace from the typical Sunday service, without the preachy or frightening parts.
It had been a sweltering August day and as he knelt, off to the side from the priest and assorted family and friends, he began perspiring through his heavy robe.
He leadeth me beside the still waters, He restoreth my soul…
Sweat mixed with tears as he experienced something he’d never associated with any church: something beyond awe, beyond peace, a sense that he was connected, in some way, to everyone in the world, all the people who’d come before and had yet to come.
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake…
He woke up in the sacristy, his father smiling (his father never smiled) down at him. “You fainted,” his old man said. Before he could respond, the priest bailed him out. “That happens all the time in the heat. It’s even happened to me once or twice.”
He cried and he allowed himself to cry (he was never allowed to cry), and his father took him for ice cream and told him he was a good altar boy, a good son.
Later in life, he could never recall what direction their conversation took, but it was most likely about sports or the upcoming school year. It was, he knew, most definitely not about the funeral, or anything that happened in the church, and especially not the way he felt or what he wanted to say but couldn’t express.
***
Far from forsaking all aspects of faith, or putting away childish things (see what I did there?), I remain on board with concept of Christ, even as a fictional character. Seriously.
Assuming J.C. is just a top tier model of literary inspiration, it’s hard to find a better guy to follow. (And by follow I mean the example and not the whole “renounce everything and squeeze through the Eye of a Needle.” I’ll leave that between God and the wizards of Wall Street.) Christ, aside from being the Endless Enigma, is arguably the most fecund source of fictional creations. Art, literature, music and movies. Especially movies.
This scene, with the vision of the smug being humbled and Christ as a defender of the dispossessed, is a ceaseless antidote for all the ways his teachings (actual or not) are perverted and co-opted. This I can endorse and get behind.
Back to sophomore year: it was around this time I started taking my first fiction workshops at George Mason University. To say my initial attempts at stories and poetry accurately reflected my age and ability is an understatement. There was one piece I took a crack at, and failed miserably. I was, of course, thinking back to the readymade parable of Christ as the least of our brothers, and I was going to write something definitive, indelible. If only. It was impossible, of course, and remained so for several years and dozens (and dozens) of drafts. It became a bit of an obsession, which I fondly recognize, now, as a necessary ingredient for artistic growth: you’re seldom satisfied, your ambition far outstrips your acumen, but you keep trying, over and over. It becomes less about developing a thicker skin for the ceaseless rejections to come, and more about trying to –as well as possible– harness your vision with the often unremarkable words on the page.
Just off the top of my head I can recall the different names the piece took. First –and for a long time– it was “The Narrow Path.” Subsequent revisions were “The City and the Stranger,” (I know, right?), “The Scarecrow and I,” “Emmaus,” and, finally, “Civitas” — which I remain unsatisfied with. Anyway, when I was in my mid-’20s, it occurred to me with the power of Epiphany (upper-case E and all) that the strategy of telling this tale necessitated the seldom-recommended use of second person narration. Things fell into place, and I was happy, for a while, and spent the next two decades tweaking and refining. Suffice it to say, the origins of this story could serve as microcosm of any writer’s journey: a three page story I spent enough time and dead trees rewriting to possibly be better-served starting a novel; it was a white whale, an itch that needed scratching, something almost like a dream.
This is, nevertheless, an instructive story, written at an important time in my development (as a writer; as a human being). Very much a recovering Catholic circa early 1990-something, some of those metaphysical wounds were still fresh, and like most earnest but clueless early 20-somethings, very few of the answers (about the world; about myself) were availing themselves easily or painlessly. One comes to learn that’s part of the process; the process itself never ends, but we hopefully arrive at a place where we’re at peace balancing what we’ve been taught and what we see and believe. It’s destined for failure, but it’s all about the (not-so-narrow) path. Right?
Why it matters, aside from getting it tolerably close to what I initially envisioned (if I’m being generous, I’ll say that it turned out much deeper than what I originally intended), is the way it serves as a mission statement of sorts as it relates to my creative and spiritual development. It’s a living document of how I’ve come to believe in something organized religion cannot inculcate, why belief (in something, anything; it could be oneself) is essential, and why deeds always mean more than words, whether written on a greeting card or a supposedly sacred text.
And so, “Civitas.” If this was written many times, it was also rejected just as consistently. It is, then, with gratitude and relief that I acknowledge WORDPEACE for publishing this one, almost thirty years after it was first written.
iii.
“Civitas”
You are alone.
You are back in the city and alone as you emerge into open and empty space, stepping out from the stale depths of the subway. The air is heavy, like some imploding dread, suffocating the city as daylight succumbs to starved evening.
You walk distractedly down the blank sidewalk, deflecting the grins and grimaces of commuters as they hurry by, delayed waves of anxious motion. The city is alive all around you: in the circular maze of windows and their electrical language, brightening as the sky darkens; in the cabs that hustle past, mocking pedestrians with warm exhalations of spent energy; in the stench of steam rising from sewage drains, escaping sullied rivers that teem in underground tunnels, and suddenly in the misshapen face of the aberration who approaches you, eyes twitching an insistent message (Help me, Help me! HELP ME!) and you recoil until he retreats into shadows, head shaking the answer he always gets (No, No! NO!). Your eyes guide you forward, eager to escape this spectacle.
Piles of steaming garbage smolder in neglected piles. Stepping awkwardly, you slip, genuflecting in the squalid slush. Impossibly, the cluster of sunken bags moves and then you see eyes, protected or trapped underneath. Your breath bursts as a distinct scent settles in the awkward shift of air. You understand, instinctively, what it signifies—and are ashamed.
Damp clouds lower in a disappearing sky: there will be more snow. And the wind, earlier a child has become a caustic man who coughs in your face, his bile gusting and swirling at your feet, over and around you, through you. Moving on slowly you curse this city and its reality you will not escape from. Praying warm thoughts, you close your eyes to think of the sun and somehow
you recall another city in another time and how frightened you were as you traveled, alone, through the hostile marketplace and the mass of humanity, an ocean upon the sand; there was no comfort in that prehistoric city: you were almost swallowed up by the groundswell of sallow, sneering faces and there was no refuge, even in the sanctuary; no solace in that holy place…and the imperious sun soaked your skin, its heat causing you to look away—to look down and in looking you saw and in seeing you were saved because suddenly you were not alone: no longer was your path solitary because he walked with you and his stride was purposeful and deliberate, and you felt him brush against you as he moved ahead, so you fell behind him and
you find yourself directly behind him, a few paces behind the man, unable to overtake him because the snow has been packed down by other pedestrians. You walk together, silhouettes in the swaying mist. Unsteady memories disorient your mind, congealing as the chill numbs your unprotected parts. The wind blows back his hair—so long you can almost touch it—and you realize its brunt is borne by this disheveled scarecrow come to life, strangely out of place in a frigid city (yet somehow familiar with his hunched shoulders and chastened gait): looking down you see his broken boots, bared soles scraping the soiled ground. You ponder the agony playing itself out in front of you as you live and breathe, once again in the city, so you close your eyes and suddenly the snow is sand and
you remember the narrow path you once traveled as the stranger walked beside you—and on that mild evening he carried his sandals in his hands and the sand was warm underneath, each grain alive between your toes; and this stranger, with his serenity and silence, reminded you of the one you knew before; the one who walked among you, always in front of you, and even then you followed him into the city: he was known by the people there and they threw flowers at his feet and smiled and you believed when the water turned sweet and your mind swam, tranquil and light. It was easy to believe, then, while you watched the cup overflow and the crimson drops fell to the ground, alive and burning, not unlike tears and
then the sand is snow and the red is there, somehow the red is still there in the darkened snow, a stream flows from the open sole of the scarecrow.
You freeze, once again left alone as he moves onward, unrecognized, into the cold corners of the city.
