I come from a strictly Protestant upbringing. I have been baptized with a
sprinkling of water by the Presbyterians and fully immersed in a big tub
wearing a white flowing robe (yikes!) by the Baptists. I guess you could say
I been baptized up one side and down the other.
But, the Catholic influence has always lingered on the fringes of my life,
as in the following examples:
Oddly, we always ate fish on Fridays and no one knew why. My mother
would just go in there and prepare either oven baked fish sticks or tuna
casserole or clam chowder on those nights and we'd dig in all happy and
excited (especially on fish stick night!) not concerned at all about why we
were honoring a Catholic tradition.
I used to envy the Catholic girls who got to wear a blue plaid jumper, white
short-sleeved shirt and blue knee socks and loafers to school.
My brother got in trouble once for being caught wearing a St. Christopher
medal. All the surfers were wearing them at the time, but my mother said
he couldn't because "You're not a Catholic" and it got yanked.
I tried going to catechism. I was in the 5th grade and Mrs. Schuler made the
announcement that if anyone wanted to, they could get on a bus an hour before
school got out on Wednesdays and go over to St. Margaret Mary's Church to
take catechism classes.
This was in the olden days when schools had the money to hire a bus to take a
bunch of kids exactly THREE blocks down the street to some Catholic church but,
strangely as I think about it now, they didn't have the money to actually pick us
up near our homes in the morning and take us to school, which meant that we had
to walk about a hundred miles EACH WAY, EVERY DAY, which was one of the
reasons I decided to go to this Cata-clism thing. I wanted to ride in a school bus!
I was some kind of desperate kid, I guess.
Anyway, I started going and we all just sat on these wooden benches in a darkened
chapel listening to these nuns dressed in long black robes with starched white veils
covering their heads, telling us that if we learned our verses we'd get a multicolored
beanie, which I really wanted! It was a hat just like the one Beany wore in the Beany
and Cecil cartoon show only without the propeller on top.
It's amazing to me now that I was doing this without any
kind of parental permission slip. I finally got around to
telling my mom about it one day and her eyes got all buggy
and everything and she told me I couldn't go because "You're
not a Catholic!" So, I never got my beanie, which bothers me
to this very day.
Then, ultimately, I married a Catholic...well, a lapsed Catholic...as in not-since-
the-8th-grade Catholic. In fact, the only way you can tell that The Man was
once an altar boy and went to Catholic school is that he can diagram a sentence,
which fills me with awe.
Now, here I am living in the mecca of Catholicism, a city with over 900 Catholic
churches and seventy zillion nuns and priests running around.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
Somewhere there's a little Catholic child in me, and she wants her beanie.
And, in my wanderings through various churches, I've found just the Saint to help me.
Saint Rita. The Patroness of Impossible Cases and Lost Causes.
Saint Rita was pretty special. She grew up wanting to be a nun but her parents
said no you have to marry this disgusting guy we have all picked out for you.
Being an obedient daughter, she went through with the marriage and even had
two children with her abusive and all around rotten husband. She spent her
days praying for her man, but it didn't do any good and finally somebody just
stabbed him to death.
But, then she had to worry about her two sons who were into the "vendetta"
thing which is so totally Italian. She didn't want them to go and murder their
father's murderer and thereby relinquish eternal life in the good heaven. So,
Rita prayed that God would
take her sons (as in
to heaven, as in
dying), thus
nipping their vendetta plans in the bud. Evidently, God heard her prayers and
both sons died within a year. Supposedly, they died of natural causes...yeah, right.
I think it was more like, "here you go, eat your mushrooms, boys!," but it was all
okay because they repented their sins before they departed.
Okay, now Rita is totally free as a bird. So, she goes and joins up with the nuns
like she wanted to do all along. The nuns take her in and you'd think she would
be happy with that and just settle down and learn to knit or something. But, no.
She wants to suffer more. So, she prays real hard and tells Jesus that she wants
to suffer like He did. Well, Jesus goes, "okay." And, the next thing you know, Rita
has a thorn stuck in her forehead. And, it's not just any thorn, it's a thorn from
the Crown of Thorns Jesus had to wear when he was crucified, and what was it
doing there sticking Saint Rita in the head I don't know!
So now Rita has this wound right in the middle of her forehead like a bad zit THAT
WON'T HEAL, no matter how much goop they put on it, AND it smells real bad.
But, Rita is in a state of bliss about it. She's just tickled pink and couldn't be happier.
Years later, after her death, they put her body in a glass coffin on display in a basilica
conveniently named after her. Her body has remained uncorrupted AND it changes
position every now and then, levitating on her feast day. Also, her eyes and mouth
seem to have a life of their own, opening and closing unaided.
And, that's not all. She's the patron saint of baseball.
Is this a far out world we live in, or what?
