December 17, 2009
Thursday

Last year was my first annual Express a Regret Day, a feature of my holiday season that I devised as an antidote to Festivus. Festivus calls for the airing of a grievance, and that can put a lot of additional negative energy into a season that already has its share of difficulties with some of the cheerful ho-ho-ho stuff. Even the tender, nostalgic memories of Christmas past can engender painful feelings as we long for times that maybe never were in exactly the way we remember them. I have every intention of airing a grievance, but I also want to continue with my efforts to identify where I have hurt someone, and to try to make amends, if only by acknowledging it.

I knew Barry and Beth in college. Actually, I knew Barry before that. He was two years ahead of me in high school. He was, well, nerdy. But in a good way. Really. He wasn’t handsome nor athletic. But he was smart, and funny, and just plain nice. We hung out in the same circles — chorus, debate team (oh yeah). We were among the hard-core Latin scholars who took four years of it, mostly because we were drawn to the charismatic Latin teacher who could make the study of Cicero as entertaining as a hootenanny. If he’d asked, I’d have gone out with him, but he didn’t. It wasn’t that I was out of his league (I was nerdier than he, really). I just think he was shy.

I met up with him again when I got to Millersville. He hadn’t changed much — still in the music groups and the forensic speech activities, the Future Teachers, and now the Newman Club (the on-campus ministry to Catholic students). Only now he had a girlfriend.

Beth had grown up in a chaotic family where life was one drama after another. She’d moved around a lot. She was eighteen years old and had lived in fifteen different places and gone to ten different schools before college. Her dorm room was the place she had occupied the longest. Like Barry, she was bookish and shy. She was also smart, funny, and just plain nice. They met in concert band. They fell in love. At the end of her freshman year, as he was graduating, they got engaged.

Beth lived down the hall in the dorm, but I got to know her most when she started coming to Newman Club. She wasn’t Catholic, wasn’t much of anything, certainly had never been part of what we now call a “faith community.” She was converting, taking instruction to become a Catholic.

As a Catholic schoolgirl I had absorbed tons of doctrine but had little real faith. I remember going to the chapel at Bishop McDevitt, sitting in the quiet as the afternoon sun poured through the red and gold stained glass windows. I waited for a great religious happening to happen in me, I wanted it to happen, but it didn’t, even during the year when I thought seriously about becoming a nun.

As I have written elsewhere, by the time I met Beth “I was on the verge of rejecting all of it. Intellectually and emotionally, I had rejected Christian theology, but it would take a while longer for me to move through a series of labels from skeptic to doubter to agnostic . . . If pressed, I would say . . .  the ‘R.C.’ in my vitae stood for Reluctant Catholic.” I went to Mass when I was at home because that was easier than coming out to my parents with my apostate status. And I liked Newman Club, which was led by a brilliant young priest whose energy and vitality belied the fact that bone cancer was destroying him from within.

I don’t remember now exactly what happened, where we were or what we were doing. Maybe it was a Newman Club activity, maybe it was just girls sitting around the dorm lounge passing the time. All I know is that I made some remarks that indicated I had a casual, even disdainful, attitude toward Catholicism and the sacraments. I know this because another girl told me later that I had upset Beth, who took all of these things very seriously. “She likes you,” the other girl said, and suggested that it was my disparagement of the faith coupled with my rote reception of communion that left Beth feeling confused and uncomfortable, and maybe a little foolish, if these things weren’t important to people who’d grown up with them, who’d grown up with Barry, who had a longer and deeper history with Barry than she did.

Looking back, I feel deeply ashamed that I could have been so unaware of the effect a put-down of faith in general, let alone the particular flavor of it that someone was learning to embrace, could have, especially if she liked me and respected the things that I said. I am further saddened to have given scandal where reception of communion is concerned. I was a dozen years away from the spiritual awakening I had longed for in high school, and when I finally did stop fleeing Him down the nights and down the days, it would be the Eucharist that would become the heart of my spirituality.

I have contact information for them, from the college alumni directory. They’re married almost forty years now, have two children ten years older than Lynn. I’m not sure I’ll write to them. I can picture them holding the letter, at this season when we sometimes get three-page Dreaded Annual Letters from people we are only tangentially acquainted with, looking at the return address, and saying, “Who?” But I have put their names into this week’s prayer mandala, colored them in Millersville’s colors, gold with a black border.

From the Archives
December 17, 2004 — Over the River and Through the Woods: She sounds like someone who moved here only to follow a spouse’s career and she’s feeling displaced among us unsophisticated central Pennsylvania bumpkins. (I’ve heard this attitude from mobile executives’ wives in my own neighborhood.)

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