“Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together…”

St. Dorothy’s Catholic Church and parochial school (my house would be in the upper lefthand corner)

I didn’t get off to a very good start with The Church—thankfully, we have developed a mutual respect over the years. Just beyond my backyard was the St. Dorothy Catholic Church and parochial school. I was not Catholic. My mother and grandmother hated Catholicism—not sure why. (My sister Diana recently told me that she attended St. Dorothy with a friend one Sunday. The whole next week she got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the jelly from Dowanee. She asked her why. “Let your Catholic friend give you jelly,” Dowanee told her.) Most of our neighborhood friends were Catholic. The Church permeated my life. There was a basketball court on the school playground and I shot thousands of baskets there. My brother taught me to ride a bike on that playground, and I taught a couple of sisters too. There was a big hill at one end of the playground that lead down to a small creek. Eight to ten foot banks lined one side of the creek. In the winter we would fly down the hill on our sleds and skid to a screeching halt right at the edge of the creek bank. More than once I overshot the stop and tumbled down the bank and into the creek, a baptism of fear and fun.

The Catholic grounds formed a compound shaped in a half oval. To the right of my backyard was the priests’ house. We all stayed away from that place. Then came the church itself, a place I remember entering only once. After that was the school building, a long brick rectangle, two floors, as dreary as any public school I ever attended. Finally, to the far left adjacent to our sledding hill was the rectory, where the nuns lived. The nuns had a brilliant cherry tree growing in their backyard. My friends and I would reconnoiter, sneak along the banks of the creek bed, steal past the large fenced-in compost bin full of leaves from the past autumn (I tasted my first alcohol in that bin, homemade wine that someone had stolen), and sprint up and into the branches of the cherry tree. We would pig out on the cherries, spitting the seeds down to the ground below. The nuns soon became wise to our sport, and they would sit, peering through the blinds or curtains of the rectory, waiting for us to make our mad dash. We called them penguins. They would come tearing out of the rectory and we would drop from the cherry tree and disappear down the banks of the creek, and I believe everyone had a very good time.

I never got confession. To this day I don’t understand telling someone else your wrongdoings, reciting a litany, and being restored to spiritual health. I was known for having an inventive mind, so my school boy friends would come to me for help with their confessions.

“What do I tell him?”

“Why don’t you tell him what you’ve done wrong?”

“Are you crazy? I don’t want my parents to find out.”

“Would he tell?”

“You never know.”

“So what do you want?”

“I don’t know. Something that’s a sin but doesn’t seem that bad.”

“Say you took money from your mom’s purse.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good. I like that. How much?”

“I can’t do everything for you.”

One of my compadres got the bright idea of taking me to mass with him. When I got to his house, his mother made me take off my clothes and put on a pair of his slacks and a dress shirt. I had never been in a church before, and St. Dorothy’s was dark and scary and awe-inspiring. Lots of candles. I had already been told I could not take communion. Imagine my surprise when I learned I couldn’t even sit with the family, but had to go to a special section in the back. Then came the ceremony. The priest didn’t speak English, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand a word he was saying. Everything was rote and repetition. I made a quick decision that I wasn’t missing much in my spiritual darkness and left the building.

Back then I had no inkling that God was personal and loved me and wanted to have a relationship with me. After I learned that (many years later), church became more palatable to me. It’s not even about the building.

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