My First Grave Sin: A Christmas Story
December 27, 2013
By Max Lindenman
Three years ago, on my last visit home to New York, I re-read my mother’s first young adult novel, and was stunned to discover she’d mixed up her virgin martyrs.
“St. Agatha lost her breasts, not St. Agnes,” I lectured. “And who’s this St. Theresa whose throat was supposedly slashed in a bathhouse? That’s St. Cecilia. Teresa, no ‘h’, was a mystic and reformer of women’s monastic life; Thérèse was a memoirist who wasted away from tuberculosis. Who let this thing go to press, anyway?”
True to her catechesis, my mother hung her head. “You lose track after a while,” she sighed. “All the stories start to dissolve into one big ocean of goodness and gore.”
A big ocean of goodness and gore. That’s certainly the impression of the Church I carried with me when I was growing up, probably because so much of it came from people like my mother — ex-Catholics with an artistic bent. To this day, I can’t witness an infant baptism without thinking of that scene from Godfather where Michael stands in for Carlo and Connie even as his goons wipe out the heads of three or four rival families. Coppolla, Scorcese, Jim Carroll — even Morton Downey, Jr. — all impressed me with the idea that a Catholic outlook, a Catholic sensibility, held the key to something primitive, authentic, and vital that seemed missing from my world of shabby-genteel secular humanism.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/diaryofawimpycatholic/2013/12/my-first-grave-sin-a-christmas-story/
