I hail from the land of Chicago Catholica, circa 1970. Growing up, the church was my world, and our parish my passport. If you’d have told me as a child that Chicago was known as the city of neighborhoods, I’d have thought you were talking about St. Ita’s, Our Lady of Lourdes, and St. Gertrude’s—the whole north side was mapquested in my brain not by streets and avenues, but by churches. Back then I thought everyone was Catholic, everyone. When the one oddball kid on my block went to the local public school instead of St. Greg’s, where the rest of us went, I pitied him and assumed his parents just couldn’t afford the tuition. I knew kids went to Pierce, the public school with the gravel baseball field on the other side of Ashland Avenue, but just who those kids were was a mystery to me. My naïve, narrow little mind could only make sense of it by deeming them disadvantaged. Everyone went to St. Greg’s; ergo, everyone wanted to go to St. Gregs; ergo if you didn’t go, it was because you couldn’t; ergo, you were poor. It wouldn’t dawn on me until years later that my own family, with only one working parent and seven children, was probably way poorer than the vast majority of those public school families. Live and learn.
When I went away to college the blinders really came off. Most people at my university weren’t Catholic. For once, I was in the minority. I was living with Lutherans, Methodists, Unitarians, Jews even! I knew, because I asked them. I went around interviewing new friends about their religious backgrounds. No one else cared but me. Everyone had an answer, everyone was something, but nobody really much cared about it. “Well, we’re Unitarian,” they’d say, or Methodist, or whatever, “We’re X, but we don’t really practice. We never really go to church, or anything.” One girl in my dorm called herself a Baha’i, something I’d never even heard of before. She explained that her faith was a sort of melding of all religions, a unity of all faiths for all mankind— and really, who could argue with that idea? I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Eileen in Carbondale, a strange land where 25,000 18-25 year-olds from all walks of life banded together, generic Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Muslims (thanks to SIU’s ambitious foreign exchange program), agnostics and atheists; all of us comrades united with a dual purpose: to study and drink beer. Religion didn’t matter. It was about love, and laughter, and higher education. It was Utopia. It was John Lennon’s Imagine. I was completely swept up and away. Just like that, into the thick of 1980’s techno rock, another lapsed Catholic was born.
Fast forward twenty years. I’m married to a wonderful Jewish man who was born in Soviet Russia and immigrated to America with his parents in the late 1970’s. I’ve lost my father to cancer. My mother just passed away from Pulmonary Fibrosis. My husband’s mother is suffering from terminal lung cancer. We feel like a tree in the boreal forest, whose trunk has been axed to the core. We are childless, having spent our time together working and traveling, and then caring for sick parents. We decide we don’t want our tree to topple. We want the cycle of life to go on. We want to have a baby.
I get pregnant, and miscarry, get pregnant, and miscarry again. I am 39 years old. My doctor tells me my eggs are old, I’m coming to the end of my fertility cycle. I am starting to get desperate. My aunt tells me about the St. Gerard medals that have been passed around the family, to female cousins trying to have children. There are two medals on a chain, and they’ve gotten several cousins pregnant— one with twins. “I only want one medal!” I say. “Can you get me one of them?” The last cousin to get the magic medals can’t part with them. She’s grown attached to them and feels like they’re protecting her precious, hard-won child from harm.
I take myself on a 45 minute drive to a Catholic missionary with a gift store that sells St. Gerard medals. I feel ashamed and sheepish. I haven’t been to Mass in years, with the exception of my parents’ funerals, and haven’t considered myself a Catholic for decades. Here I was now, turning up on the church’s doorstep desperate and desolate, like a prodigal daughter.
I buy the St. Gerard medal, and decide to stop into the missionary’s church on my way out, to light a candle for my parents, and drop a donation into the collection box—it’s the least I can do. The big church is dark and empty. I walk up and down the aisles like a museum-goer, taking in the stained glass and statuaries. I light two candles, inhaling deeply, enjoying the waxy, honey, smoky scent of the votives, and stuff a ten dollar bill into the box. I walk over to a wooden pew and sit, reaching down to pull out the kneeler. The bench creaks loudly, protesting my weight. The thud of the kneeler as it hits the marble floor echoes all around me. I say an Our Father and a Hail Mary, and then I just kneel for a while, missing my parents, and thinking, for the first time in a long time, of those days back in the 1970’s, when churches were as comfortable to me as the living room sofa in my parents’ old two flat.
I’d have him baptized, I decided then and there. Or her, if it was a girl. If by some miracle I was able to have a baby, I’d have the child baptized in a Catholic church, as homage to my mother and my father, and the church, who raised me, and gave me the heart and the capacity to love without borders, to look to the good in all people, and to hope for things yet to be.
