How to Be Reverent
How do you remain reverent when they take away the thing you revere? We wondered about that then.
The three ropes were new seventy years before, in 1906, attached in the darkness overhead. Dust floated in oblong snatches of sunlight, like bugs at a streetlamp. The dust landed and clung to the rough lumber. Steps ascended higher into the steeple where the bells were. A bannister waited for a hand—just two-by-fours and posts—and the stairs looked like they might creak just for being seen, couldn’t withstand the weight of someone’s gaze. Who would want to go up there, near the bells?
No double or triple dare could make us climb them.
Beneath the stairs, statues of saints and angels covered in oilcloth stood in ghostly, silent prayer, bathed in haunting spiderwebs, waiting to frighten the younger boys. On the front side of the church was a silent window, just as ghostly: the Virgin Mary, an apparition in stained glass. It was the biggest window at St. Stan’s, the one that received the least attention.
Not many parishioners made their way to the belfry, and Father Ted rarely thought to turn on the spotlights, to give Mary life, an opportunity for the Mother of Jesus to be seen from outside. The window, once proud and gleaming, was as grimy as the wood, tainted by age and neglect.
The three bells were rung by hand, by altar boys who swung on them, lifted off the floor like a rusty, clattering carnival ride. The weight of the bells carried gangly bodies on greasy ropes as heavy clangs muffled or outshouted inevitable laughter. It was cacophony, no semblance of rhythm or continuity with the bells at St. Stanislaus.
Other churches might have one bell, or they might have an orderly, hourly song. But the bells at St. Stan’s rang on the whims and strength of three altar boys pulling three separate ropes with three centers of gravity, three different counterweights, three different ideas of rhythm, three different energy levels, three different wills.
How to be reverent, then, as we moved down the too-small steps, through the choir loft, another flight of steps to the nave, hurried, thoughtless genuflection in the sanctuary, and back to the sacristy? Grins and elbow bumps, stifled laughter, flushed faces, red cassocks buttoned down to the ankles and slowing our will to trot to the altar, but no. No horseplay.
“Settle down,” my father would have said. “You’re in church.” His voice would have come from the choir; he would have been forced to interrupt a Polish hymn, and I would have been conscious of his line of sight, aware that I shouldn’t horse around just moments before mass.
And we went from the altar boys’ sacristy, through the cave-like hallway behind the altar, eerie and fascinating with mysterious closets pleading to be opened. Father Ted waited on the other side, probably in good humor, used to the silliness that boys carried like luggage, like a shaving bag, packed and ready for action.
He was Polish through and through, Father Ted, and his accent bore the weight of Krakow, where he told us he’d been ordained. “Say Kru-kov. The w like a v in Polish, the l like a w. Don’t forget.”
He prayed a silent prayer before mass began, his right hand extended over our heads, praying, probably, that we would handle the water and wine with reverence and respect, that we wouldn’t make eyes at someone who knelt for Holy Communion while we held the paten. He must have prayed that mass would be peaceful and serious and holy. The prayer was sealed with a sign of the Cross. He checked his vestments one final time and said, “Okay, boys, let’s go.”
I didn’t know Polish, but I could sing it, could read the words aloud. The bells rang on the day I took the Polish prayer book. I didn’t serve mass that day. A small rack of prayer books sat in the vestibule, and I liked the cover of one of them, a blue image of the Virgin on a light green background, a Polish title I didn’t understand, a mystery.
I stuffed the book into a coat pocket, decided that I needed it, ran my fingers over the smooth cover during mass. Had I stolen it? I wasn’t sure and fretted about it for an entire Sunday.
My mother pulled the book out of the pocket—I saw her show it to my father, saw her raise questioning eyebrows, watched her gently replace the book in the pocket of the winter coat without a word, a coat that, even now, brings slush to mind—melting, dirty snow outside the church and cars splashing by on the main road. Wind whipped our hair and made the legs of our pants wave and flutter. Shoulders up, eyes squinted, lips pursed, still defenseless against the January wind. To avoid discovery, I put the prayer book in a trash can at school on Monday. It was recess, and I tossed the book into a barrel they used to burn trash.
August was not cold when we got the call about Father Ted’s death. Florida. A heart attack. He’d been on vacation. I didn’t know priests took vacations. I’d never seen the church so crowded when the day of his funeral arrived. Altar boys were relegated to the basement of the church, a closed-circuit camera; the crowd was too large.
Only one of the three bells rang that day, the rhythm of mourning, and I imagined an adult swinging on the rope out of respect. Solemn altar boys sat in metal folding chairs in the boiling, humid basement. A black and white television provided a view of the immovable coffin facing the altar. The Bishop said mass, murmured a silent prayer and made the sign of the Cross over Father Ted’s still body. We altar boys needed to consider death. We did not laugh that day.
Bells ring at Christmas, and I wasn’t an altar boy anymore. High school brought a type of adulthood, a sort of knowing, that wink you give people when you’re suddenly aware of a secret. Uncle Stanley was older. Just old. I couldn’t remember him ever being young. Mortality winked at him, and he’d been through the hospital wringer, through mountains of pills and shots.
But he wanted to go to midnight mass. In the sub-zero wind, we lifted him, my brother and me, grabbed him under the arms and carried him across the road and hurried his bulk up the two flights of cement steps to get inside the church and out of the cold. My dad had turned around in the car and pulled a knit hat over Stanley’s white hair. “Wear this. It’s freezing out there.”
Stanley laughed, a squeaky, hoarse, chittering laughter, breathlessly tried to say something as we lifted and heaved him upward, like necessary horseplay. When you’re eighty, it’s okay to giggle before mass starts, before you put on your reverent face and bless yourself to say prayers in Polish. Laughter is needed most when you consider whether you’ll be here for next Christmas or the one after because you know you’re just getting older, and life is getting shorter. Mortality winking.
Smell the incense. It’s time to be reverent. Time to get serious and consider your sins and what they mean. What’s the big picture look like after you’ve checked out? Is Heaven really there? No one can be sure. No one can be sure.
My father cried when they closed Saint Stanislaus. Budgetary constraints and a dwindling number of priests and dwindling parishioners and, we thought, no reverence for tradition at the Bishop’s office. Who needs a Polish church? The bells went silent, the paintings of Polish saints had no one on whom to gaze. No giggling old men or rushing altar boys, no Polish hymns, no priests with fleeting memories of Krakow, no cigars at the rectory, no holupki dinners in that damp basement.
How do you remain reverent when they take away the thing you revere? We wondered about that then. We did. But the bells were silent, and we didn’t have an answer. St. Stanislaus stood alone, empty, cold, waiting.
My father’s funeral was in a different church. It was not the church he revered where his life had unfolded, not Saint Stanislaus Kostka where he’d watched his children suffer the waters of baptism. But he did manage to get a spot at Saint Stan’s cemetery, not far from Father Ted. It means something, right? And he will wait there, like the church of his youth, alone, waiting for Paradise, or something. We had to leave him there that day, and I thought, no, we can’t, it’s too cold. It’s February. He’s gonna be cold.
A building is just a building, you say, brick and mortar, wood and metal. Belief is lifted by a chilly, biting breeze, and it can blow away, snatched up by time. We cannot ensure things will stand; we ourselves will not be indestructible, though we want to be. We cannot hold fast to man-made cathedrals or altars. And we cannot hold fast to people. They are hymns, lyric and melody in the ether, a memory to believe, to reach for, to make real, somehow. How is it that things disappear, so that we can no longer touch them?
Three bells echo off the hills, part of a black and white world where altar boys still shout and laugh. At times, perhaps, we can conjure the color, the red cassocks, the worn wood of the belfry, white cigar smoke that floats outside the church, smoke that will finally cool and join whatever else hovers there, invisible, gone, forgotten. Gone for good, we think. Gone for good.
Mostly, you have disappeared. We can’t see you anymore.