Disciple
by Charlie Kondek
Author's Note: The piece draws from two aspects of Lucia's work. First of all, I wouldn't even be a Lucia Berlin reader if Cowboy Jamboree hadn't recommended her, and I only read A Manual For Cleaning Women recently. I'm blown away. But what I have attempted to emulate here are the master's use of the techniques of autofiction, of reassembling and fictionalizing aspects of my own life, and her explorations of the theme of religion. "Disciple" is about a Catholic's dwelling among Protestants and the hybridization that results, the opposite of what Lucia wrote about in such stories as "Stars and Saints," the Protestant among the Catholic. If it is a manual for anything, it might be a manual for that type of internal, interdenominational dialogue and the awkward stumbling after faith.
Among the attendants of a weekday noontime mass at any Catholic church you will likely find, beside the devoted without other obligations, a few working people using their lunch break to go to church. Doug knew this, because he was sometimes one of them. He’d always been able to find a church with a 12:00 or 12:15 mass near any place he’d worked, and he had observed the same phenomenon. The masses were usually sparsely attended compared to Sundays, but among the casually dressed people and the retirees, at least one head kerchief and VFW hat (removed), there’d be a few suits and ties, a few work boots and sport coats.
When he worked in Southfield, he’d go to Transfiguration. In Dearborn, Sts. Peter and Paul. When he worked downtown, he’d go to St. Mary’s in Greektown and even see some of his clients from General Motors there, the stinkers. When he worked in Ann Arbor he liked attending the noon mass at the university student parish where, naturally, you’d see more students and faculty. But it was always the same. Taking stock of the congregation and his place in it, he’d note which ones he thought were, like him, going back to work after mass.
That wasn’t the only difference Doug tracked, however. As he’d stand with them, sit with them, kneel with them and sing with them, he’d reflect on the diversity of their brotherhood, sisterhood, and he delighted in exchanging the Sign of Peace. But there was one key liturgical moment where he broke ranks. When it was time to take Communion, Doug stayed in his seat. That’s because he was married to a Protestant.
Oh, he knew some parishes might not mind if he did take Communion. The university church was particularly liberal, even not so subtly welcoming and encouraging of gay students. But he didn’t want to break the rules. Was he any kind of Catholic? He hadn’t had his marriage to Cindy officially convalidated and he wasn’t insisting the kids be brought up Catholic. On Sunday, he was in a Presbyterian church that was a nice meeting point between himself and his Baptist wife. The only time he attended Catholic mass was like this, on the side, by himself. And he knew the requirements for Communion. Asked to describe himself, he often quipped he was “culturally Catholic, practically Protestant.” The body and blood in this setting was not for the likes of him.
*
The first time Doug set foot in a Protestant church it was the Vineyard in Ann Arbor where Cindy took him when they were still dating. “You know, Bob Dylan came to Christ in a Vineyard,” she said. Right, Doug remembered, and then recorded Slow Train Coming and Shot of Love and those Jesus records he didn’t particularly like. Cindy wasn’t exactly selling him on this.
His initial impressions were, first of all, how bright and modern it all looked, how happy and expressive. He would later joke that he missed organ music and the smell of incense, but the truth was he was also uncomfortable with the way the people behaved here, especially as the band took the stage and launched into the contemporary God-rock that prompted the congregants to not just stand and sing but raise and wave their hands and sway, as if at a concert rather than a church service. He later heard another first-timer, a Methodist, express the same culture shock because he’d been raised one of the “frozen chosen,” and Doug felt the phrase described his preferred posture perfectly.
But he had other reasons to feel uncomfortable. Not only was this not his brand of Christianity, he wasn’t at that time particularly a Christian at all. In fact, he’d been something of a preachy agnostic for many years, a “recovering Catholic,” before settling into a kind of vague acceptance and curiosity about faith practice that even embraced the New Age, what people often called “spiritual, but not religious.” What was he doing here? That knock-out skin and breathtaking butt on Cindy, there was his answer. He thought privately to himself something that was later actually said to him, by a biker from the Vineyard at Doug’s rather tame but still boozy bachelor party. “You ain’t the first man to be dragged back to church by a woman, and you won’t be the last.” Only he didn’t say “a woman.”
In time, Doug became comfortable with the waving, shouting, clapping of his neighbors, even if he wasn’t going to do it himself. Even speaking in tongues, which occasionally broke out among the Vineyard’s more charismatic parishioners, was something he could not just tolerate but admire from a distance, even as he remained, rooted in his spot and smiling politely, a frozen chosen. He’d once seen a young Asian guy approach the altar during closing worship and lay, arms extended, on his face on the floor. On the floor! Doug could never. But that didn’t stop him from appreciating, even being inspired by it.
Besides, he was a believer himself by then.
*
Leaving the noon mass to walk back to his office, Doug sometimes reflected on the layers of embarrassment he’d experienced along his “faith journey.” There was, obviously, the embarrassment at having to tell his friends and family that he was going to become a Christian (again). He felt this most acutely among some of his friends that not only were not believers themselves but outside and even hostile to any kind of religion. And then, of course, he’d have to contradict the preachy agnosticism of his younger days. Reverse himself. He remembered mentioning it to an acquaintance. “Going back to church,” was how he put it. The acquaintance made an expression of distaste before offering, “Well, don’t let it go too far.”
But the circuit of that thinking closed on the embarrassment he now felt at having abandoned faith in the first place. At the time, in his late teens and early 20s, he would have said he’d examined the evidence for Christian faith and found it insufficient, but the truth was that despite a cradle Catholicism and even a Catholic education that examination had been rather shallow. If he was being truthful with himself he would have admitted he stopped believing because, in his mind, it’s not what the smart people believed, the cool people. Bob Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited? Cool. Bob Dylan on Slow Train Coming, not cool. As simple as that.
When Doug thought of it now, he thought of all those resources at his disposal, that library of thought, those thinkers. He engaged with them as an adult, under the advisement of the pastors at the Vineyard or knowledgeable friends, drank deeply from Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, C.S. Lewis of course. And he had dismissed these as unintelligent? Such arrogance. Such foolishness. Who the hell had he thought he was?
Quasi-Buddhist street mystic Jack Kerouac, cool. Canadian-American Christian Kerouac, not cool.
Layers of embarrassment.
*
The reaction of Doug’s parents to his betrothal to Cindy and its faith component was, mixed. Of course they liked Cindy and Doug was free to marry whomever he pleased. And they were thrilled that this included Doug returning to church. But it couldn’t be the Roman Catholic church? His mother explained about the possibility of a dispensation. Even if Doug was interested, Cindy wasn’t. Once when attending the wedding of Catholic friends she’d leaned over and whispered to him during the priest’s preparation of the eucharist, “He’s casting a magic spell.” She was only teasing, but it summarized her attitude toward interdenominational elements in their nuptials. Somewhere in the murky realms of Anglo-Saxon history her ancestors had cast off the yoke of papacy and she wasn’t about to shoulder it now.
Eventually, Doug’s mother was simply happy for her son, to see him attached to a spouse and some kind of faith tradition, an end to all his straying. The reaction of Doug’s dad puzzled him but didn’t surprise him. Doug’s dad never passed up a chance to make jokes about how Doug’s new relatives were “snake handlers”—not in their hearing of course—and wrinkled his nose from time to time whenever Doug said or did anything “churchy.” Doug supposed that, in his father’s view, one’s Christian faith should be kept to one’s self and never discussed, membership in the right kind of club, dues paid and rituals observed privately.
Not so, Doug’s new Protestant in-laws. It wasn’t as if they discussed their religion at all times, just that they didn’t treat it like a secret handshake. For a while, being in the same room with Cindy’s father was like being in the same room with Billy Graham, but eventually he attained perspective and grew comfortable with such Protestant practices as spontaneous, unstructured prayer, remarking “praise God” when something good happened, and discussing what was happening in Bible study the same way one might discuss the previous evening’s ball game.
The joining of these familial cultures resulted in a few soft collisions, mostly comical. When Cindy gave birth to their son, for example, Doug’s family had to content themselves with the fact that the baby would be “dedicated” at the Vineyard, not baptized, which would occur if the boy chose it when he was old enough to discern its significance. What Catholics would have called Confirmation. Doug’s father offered to acquire a Catholic baptism for the boy, secretly if need be, like the purveyor of some contraband, an emissary from the Roman mafia. Doug and Cindy’s wedding was performed by a friend of Cindy’s family, a Baptist minister, and if anyone on Doug’s side balked at the lack of liturgy, the occasion for a sermon, they dissolved the notion afterward within the universal reconciliation of food and booze. Doug remembered something an Orthodox friend had said, trying to summarize their similarities. “It’s all Jesus and sausages.”
*
“I’m going back to church,” Doug had said to his acquaintance. “Well. Don’t let it go too far.” What did that mean? What was too far?
Doug supposed that for decades American Christians had tried to find some short hand way of describing their enthusiasm for their faith, the extent to which they tried not just to identify it but live it. “Fundamentalist” was a popular term for a while. “Evangelicals” was what they said now. The problem with either was how quickly they came to describe not inner attitudes so much as intolerant cultural forces and conservative voting blocs, neither of which applied to Doug. If he were a certain type, he might have described himself as “born again,” but he could no more do that than lay on his face in front of the altar while the band played “Our God is an Awesome God,” even though the term, Gospely rooted, had been invented for one such as he. Eventually he borrowed a phrase from Lyle Lovett. Asked what kind of Christian he was, Doug might say he was a “bar on Friday, church on Sunday” type of Christian.
Still, what did his acquaintance mean when he said “too far?’ Doug supposed the man meant, I can see you’re going to make some significant changes in your life, and I’m happy for you, but I hope you don’t change so much that we can’t speak as normal people. Just two guys from Michigan.
At the bottom of it all was a sincere desire to engage with God and practice discipleship, however clumsily. In fact, there was the word for what Doug was or what he was trying to be. “Disciple.” One who lives with some degree of discipline. In practicing that discipline, Doug obeyed instincts perhaps more emotional and enculturated than intellectual or realized. If that meant he could clasp hands with his in-laws while Cindy’s dad prayed out loud and not by rote over food, but at the same time his fingers started to fly to his forehead involuntarily to make the Sign of the Cross that no one else would make, then that’s what it meant. Theology interested him hardly at all. While saying a rosary, something else he did by himself, he would bump on the Hail Marys just for a moment, wondering dimly if the prayer was idolatrous before deciding it didn’t bother him that much and moving on to the next bead.
The most important aspect of religion, he reckoned, happened underneath all that. In the heart. In the privacy of one’s thoughts, what he was best able to do in the comparative darkness of a Catholic church, even as he abstained from breaking bread with others. His prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven,” yes, but also “have mercy on me, a sinner,” yes, but also “Day by Day” from Godspell, yes, but also…
How to put this into words? Sometimes, you just can’t. At the Vineyard, a brave young man lays on his face with his arms outstretched. At Transfiguration, an old man picks up his VFW hat at the conclusion of the noon mass and, walking up the aisle by the end of the pews, kisses his hand and lays it at the feet of a statue of St. Anthony.
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.
by Charlie Kondek
Author's Note: The piece draws from two aspects of Lucia's work. First of all, I wouldn't even be a Lucia Berlin reader if Cowboy Jamboree hadn't recommended her, and I only read A Manual For Cleaning Women recently. I'm blown away. But what I have attempted to emulate here are the master's use of the techniques of autofiction, of reassembling and fictionalizing aspects of my own life, and her explorations of the theme of religion. "Disciple" is about a Catholic's dwelling among Protestants and the hybridization that results, the opposite of what Lucia wrote about in such stories as "Stars and Saints," the Protestant among the Catholic. If it is a manual for anything, it might be a manual for that type of internal, interdenominational dialogue and the awkward stumbling after faith.
Among the attendants of a weekday noontime mass at any Catholic church you will likely find, beside the devoted without other obligations, a few working people using their lunch break to go to church. Doug knew this, because he was sometimes one of them. He’d always been able to find a church with a 12:00 or 12:15 mass near any place he’d worked, and he had observed the same phenomenon. The masses were usually sparsely attended compared to Sundays, but among the casually dressed people and the retirees, at least one head kerchief and VFW hat (removed), there’d be a few suits and ties, a few work boots and sport coats.
When he worked in Southfield, he’d go to Transfiguration. In Dearborn, Sts. Peter and Paul. When he worked downtown, he’d go to St. Mary’s in Greektown and even see some of his clients from General Motors there, the stinkers. When he worked in Ann Arbor he liked attending the noon mass at the university student parish where, naturally, you’d see more students and faculty. But it was always the same. Taking stock of the congregation and his place in it, he’d note which ones he thought were, like him, going back to work after mass.
That wasn’t the only difference Doug tracked, however. As he’d stand with them, sit with them, kneel with them and sing with them, he’d reflect on the diversity of their brotherhood, sisterhood, and he delighted in exchanging the Sign of Peace. But there was one key liturgical moment where he broke ranks. When it was time to take Communion, Doug stayed in his seat. That’s because he was married to a Protestant.
Oh, he knew some parishes might not mind if he did take Communion. The university church was particularly liberal, even not so subtly welcoming and encouraging of gay students. But he didn’t want to break the rules. Was he any kind of Catholic? He hadn’t had his marriage to Cindy officially convalidated and he wasn’t insisting the kids be brought up Catholic. On Sunday, he was in a Presbyterian church that was a nice meeting point between himself and his Baptist wife. The only time he attended Catholic mass was like this, on the side, by himself. And he knew the requirements for Communion. Asked to describe himself, he often quipped he was “culturally Catholic, practically Protestant.” The body and blood in this setting was not for the likes of him.
*
The first time Doug set foot in a Protestant church it was the Vineyard in Ann Arbor where Cindy took him when they were still dating. “You know, Bob Dylan came to Christ in a Vineyard,” she said. Right, Doug remembered, and then recorded Slow Train Coming and Shot of Love and those Jesus records he didn’t particularly like. Cindy wasn’t exactly selling him on this.
His initial impressions were, first of all, how bright and modern it all looked, how happy and expressive. He would later joke that he missed organ music and the smell of incense, but the truth was he was also uncomfortable with the way the people behaved here, especially as the band took the stage and launched into the contemporary God-rock that prompted the congregants to not just stand and sing but raise and wave their hands and sway, as if at a concert rather than a church service. He later heard another first-timer, a Methodist, express the same culture shock because he’d been raised one of the “frozen chosen,” and Doug felt the phrase described his preferred posture perfectly.
But he had other reasons to feel uncomfortable. Not only was this not his brand of Christianity, he wasn’t at that time particularly a Christian at all. In fact, he’d been something of a preachy agnostic for many years, a “recovering Catholic,” before settling into a kind of vague acceptance and curiosity about faith practice that even embraced the New Age, what people often called “spiritual, but not religious.” What was he doing here? That knock-out skin and breathtaking butt on Cindy, there was his answer. He thought privately to himself something that was later actually said to him, by a biker from the Vineyard at Doug’s rather tame but still boozy bachelor party. “You ain’t the first man to be dragged back to church by a woman, and you won’t be the last.” Only he didn’t say “a woman.”
In time, Doug became comfortable with the waving, shouting, clapping of his neighbors, even if he wasn’t going to do it himself. Even speaking in tongues, which occasionally broke out among the Vineyard’s more charismatic parishioners, was something he could not just tolerate but admire from a distance, even as he remained, rooted in his spot and smiling politely, a frozen chosen. He’d once seen a young Asian guy approach the altar during closing worship and lay, arms extended, on his face on the floor. On the floor! Doug could never. But that didn’t stop him from appreciating, even being inspired by it.
Besides, he was a believer himself by then.
*
Leaving the noon mass to walk back to his office, Doug sometimes reflected on the layers of embarrassment he’d experienced along his “faith journey.” There was, obviously, the embarrassment at having to tell his friends and family that he was going to become a Christian (again). He felt this most acutely among some of his friends that not only were not believers themselves but outside and even hostile to any kind of religion. And then, of course, he’d have to contradict the preachy agnosticism of his younger days. Reverse himself. He remembered mentioning it to an acquaintance. “Going back to church,” was how he put it. The acquaintance made an expression of distaste before offering, “Well, don’t let it go too far.”
But the circuit of that thinking closed on the embarrassment he now felt at having abandoned faith in the first place. At the time, in his late teens and early 20s, he would have said he’d examined the evidence for Christian faith and found it insufficient, but the truth was that despite a cradle Catholicism and even a Catholic education that examination had been rather shallow. If he was being truthful with himself he would have admitted he stopped believing because, in his mind, it’s not what the smart people believed, the cool people. Bob Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited? Cool. Bob Dylan on Slow Train Coming, not cool. As simple as that.
When Doug thought of it now, he thought of all those resources at his disposal, that library of thought, those thinkers. He engaged with them as an adult, under the advisement of the pastors at the Vineyard or knowledgeable friends, drank deeply from Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, C.S. Lewis of course. And he had dismissed these as unintelligent? Such arrogance. Such foolishness. Who the hell had he thought he was?
Quasi-Buddhist street mystic Jack Kerouac, cool. Canadian-American Christian Kerouac, not cool.
Layers of embarrassment.
*
The reaction of Doug’s parents to his betrothal to Cindy and its faith component was, mixed. Of course they liked Cindy and Doug was free to marry whomever he pleased. And they were thrilled that this included Doug returning to church. But it couldn’t be the Roman Catholic church? His mother explained about the possibility of a dispensation. Even if Doug was interested, Cindy wasn’t. Once when attending the wedding of Catholic friends she’d leaned over and whispered to him during the priest’s preparation of the eucharist, “He’s casting a magic spell.” She was only teasing, but it summarized her attitude toward interdenominational elements in their nuptials. Somewhere in the murky realms of Anglo-Saxon history her ancestors had cast off the yoke of papacy and she wasn’t about to shoulder it now.
Eventually, Doug’s mother was simply happy for her son, to see him attached to a spouse and some kind of faith tradition, an end to all his straying. The reaction of Doug’s dad puzzled him but didn’t surprise him. Doug’s dad never passed up a chance to make jokes about how Doug’s new relatives were “snake handlers”—not in their hearing of course—and wrinkled his nose from time to time whenever Doug said or did anything “churchy.” Doug supposed that, in his father’s view, one’s Christian faith should be kept to one’s self and never discussed, membership in the right kind of club, dues paid and rituals observed privately.
Not so, Doug’s new Protestant in-laws. It wasn’t as if they discussed their religion at all times, just that they didn’t treat it like a secret handshake. For a while, being in the same room with Cindy’s father was like being in the same room with Billy Graham, but eventually he attained perspective and grew comfortable with such Protestant practices as spontaneous, unstructured prayer, remarking “praise God” when something good happened, and discussing what was happening in Bible study the same way one might discuss the previous evening’s ball game.
The joining of these familial cultures resulted in a few soft collisions, mostly comical. When Cindy gave birth to their son, for example, Doug’s family had to content themselves with the fact that the baby would be “dedicated” at the Vineyard, not baptized, which would occur if the boy chose it when he was old enough to discern its significance. What Catholics would have called Confirmation. Doug’s father offered to acquire a Catholic baptism for the boy, secretly if need be, like the purveyor of some contraband, an emissary from the Roman mafia. Doug and Cindy’s wedding was performed by a friend of Cindy’s family, a Baptist minister, and if anyone on Doug’s side balked at the lack of liturgy, the occasion for a sermon, they dissolved the notion afterward within the universal reconciliation of food and booze. Doug remembered something an Orthodox friend had said, trying to summarize their similarities. “It’s all Jesus and sausages.”
*
“I’m going back to church,” Doug had said to his acquaintance. “Well. Don’t let it go too far.” What did that mean? What was too far?
Doug supposed that for decades American Christians had tried to find some short hand way of describing their enthusiasm for their faith, the extent to which they tried not just to identify it but live it. “Fundamentalist” was a popular term for a while. “Evangelicals” was what they said now. The problem with either was how quickly they came to describe not inner attitudes so much as intolerant cultural forces and conservative voting blocs, neither of which applied to Doug. If he were a certain type, he might have described himself as “born again,” but he could no more do that than lay on his face in front of the altar while the band played “Our God is an Awesome God,” even though the term, Gospely rooted, had been invented for one such as he. Eventually he borrowed a phrase from Lyle Lovett. Asked what kind of Christian he was, Doug might say he was a “bar on Friday, church on Sunday” type of Christian.
Still, what did his acquaintance mean when he said “too far?’ Doug supposed the man meant, I can see you’re going to make some significant changes in your life, and I’m happy for you, but I hope you don’t change so much that we can’t speak as normal people. Just two guys from Michigan.
At the bottom of it all was a sincere desire to engage with God and practice discipleship, however clumsily. In fact, there was the word for what Doug was or what he was trying to be. “Disciple.” One who lives with some degree of discipline. In practicing that discipline, Doug obeyed instincts perhaps more emotional and enculturated than intellectual or realized. If that meant he could clasp hands with his in-laws while Cindy’s dad prayed out loud and not by rote over food, but at the same time his fingers started to fly to his forehead involuntarily to make the Sign of the Cross that no one else would make, then that’s what it meant. Theology interested him hardly at all. While saying a rosary, something else he did by himself, he would bump on the Hail Marys just for a moment, wondering dimly if the prayer was idolatrous before deciding it didn’t bother him that much and moving on to the next bead.
The most important aspect of religion, he reckoned, happened underneath all that. In the heart. In the privacy of one’s thoughts, what he was best able to do in the comparative darkness of a Catholic church, even as he abstained from breaking bread with others. His prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven,” yes, but also “have mercy on me, a sinner,” yes, but also “Day by Day” from Godspell, yes, but also…
How to put this into words? Sometimes, you just can’t. At the Vineyard, a brave young man lays on his face with his arms outstretched. At Transfiguration, an old man picks up his VFW hat at the conclusion of the noon mass and, walking up the aisle by the end of the pews, kisses his hand and lays it at the feet of a statue of St. Anthony.
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.