Love and Sobriety (eBook)

Chapter One

The church was dark inside. For a very small boy, it had an aura of terrible mystery to it.

In the church, we never talked, except in whispers. The dark pews whispered back, huddled around the bases of the huge columns that soared up to the roof.

When I looked up to the ceiling, there was the devil getting his butt kicked straight into hell, an angel with his wings folded back, falling, falling, falling. And the Brothers, their long black robes whispering along the floor, would explain to us: “Do you see that? That’s what will happen to you when you sin.”

I was four. I didn’t even know what sin was. But already, I was being pointed down, down, in terror.

I was the youngest of eight children in a Roman Catholic family in the province of Quebec. In that setting, one is not asked if he wishes to be baptized. It is simply done. Within days, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic religion, with two good Roman Catholics as godparents.

I learned to pray at home, both formal prayers and real ones. My parents believed in the saying, “The family that prays together stays together.” After supper, we gathered in the living room on our knees to say the rosary. It was a serious business—no smiling, no laughing—saying the same words over and over.

We prayed for my oldest brother, who was in the Air Force during the war. First we prayed for him because he was in the war. Then we prayed for him because he was missing. Finally we prayed for him because he had been killed.

With my mouth I said the words of the rosary, while my mind tried to figure out how to tell Dad that I got my report card that day. Even while saying the beads, I recall that my strongest prayer was, “God, don’t let him get mad.”

I didn’t like traipsing into the living room to concentrate on black beads and death. But it was a form of escape—it beat doing the dishes.

Sundays were somber days. In the darkness of a winter morning, we struggled out of bed, searched for pants without holes in the knees, searched for two socks that matched, stuffed cardboard in the soles of shoes that had holes in them, and trudged off to Mass at the church before breakfast.

We worried about remembering not to eat even a piece of bread before leaving, an act that would have prevented us from receiving communion.

I didn’t understand why we went. It was a long walk from our home. Not even Mother and Father seemed happy about going. Those were hard times, and I’m sure my father would have welcomed a few more hours in which he could work, with so many mouths to feed.

But it was a duty one did. So we went, every Sunday, to be told we were sinful, and needed to be redeemed by the blood in the cup.

After Mass, we hurried home with our bellies touching our backbones, having fasted so that we could go and receive the Lord in our hearts. I found the idea confusing. “How did the Lord get into my heart from my belly?” I would ask my mother. Or, “Would God have been offended if I had eaten to get the strength to go to his house to see him?”

But when I could smell bacon and eggs frying in the kitchen, while I sat reading the funnies in the living room, that was when I knew there was a God.

After breakfast, the depression set in again. Everyone scurried off to keep out of everyone else’s way, but especially out of the way of Mother and Dad. I guess they would start thinking about the week ahead, about trying to keep a large family on the straight and narrow, and about trying to keep them all fed, and it spoiled their temper.

Montreal had a large Jewish population, many of my playmates were Jews. I wondered why they could he happy on their day of worship, but we couldn’t on ours.

Most of the religious thoughts I had came from my parents. Some came from my older brothers and sisters who were already in the Catholic school system. The first religious precept to stick in my mind was this—if I was bad, the devil would get me; if I was good, God would be happy.

I spent much of my time before I went to school trying to make God happy. But I spent more time, lying in the dark after I went to bed, thinking about the devil. He was more real than God was, perhaps because people spent more time talking about him, and what he would do if he ever caught me sinning, than they did talking about God.

If I had never gone to school, I might have developed more love for my church. But at the age of seven, I was enrolled in the nearest Catholic School.

Black is not a happy color. Black was the color of authority. Police cars were black. The strap was black. Priests wore black, Nuns wore black. The teaching Brothers all wore black.

I was terrified. When my mother led me into class for my first day of school. I felt as if I was being exiled to reformatory. My mother trudged off home. I was right behind her. She had to take me back three times.

From the teaching Brothers, I learned to fear God, to fear my church, and to fear them. Whatever else they taught me, they passed on a fear of God so great it bordered on paranoia. In their total dedication to God, they lost any sense of compassion towards those they were teaching. To this day, I cannot remember their faces, but only that they seemed to me to be mean and cruel.

I remember only one Brother who was a kind and thoughtful man. I never got the strap from that man. Nor, as I recall it, did anyone else. That was one man who emulated what I believe to be the spirit of God. I believe in a loving God. That is not daring to say that I know God myself. But in that man, I believe I saw a reflection of God.

As a Catholic youth, of course, I couldn’t expect to know God directly. God had to be approached through an intermediary, probably dressed in black.

Religious class was the most unpleasant part of the school day. It was not a time to discover God, but like Latin or Math a time for repetition and memorizing. I can still see myself, in Grade IV or V. In front of me on my desk is the Catechism, a book of questions and answers. Behind me, dressed in black like the bad guy in a Tom Mix western, stands the Brother. Instead of a gun, he carries a strap. It’s made from leather horse harness. It too is black, with white stitching standing out along the edges.

I think it was Emerson who said, “We can never see Christianity from the catechism.” He was right. But the reason I couldn’t see it was because the tears were streaming down my face onto the little book and all the pages were blurred. If I was asked a question and my answer didn’t come quickly enough, the strap descended. The question was asked again, shouted, as if making it louder would make the answer come easier.

So I learned about God while sitting in a pool of my own urine, feeling my knees shaking and my bowels loosening.

“Who is God?” asked one of those questions in the little book. I don’t remember the predetermined answer it gave, but I remember still the answer I wanted to give: “God is a mean son-of-a-bitch dressed in black and his name is Brother William!”

I didn’t go to Mass because of any sense of God’s presence in the ceremony. I went because I was afraid—afraid first of my father, then of those Brothers. Like everyone else, I went when I was told to. Once I was enrolled in school, the school chose the time for us to attend. Early morning Mass was for children, late Mass for adults. The system even reached into our homes on weekends, to get us.

Occasionally, my father had a run in with the school. Sometimes he wanted us to attend Mass at his time, not theirs. On those Sundays when we went as a family to the later Mass, we lived in fear of Monday morning. Always, we would be asked which Mass we had attended. We were prisoners who reported back to the penitentiary on Monday morning, reported back to guards dressed in long black robes.

I think that was where I first learned to provide excuses. You always had to have an excuse. There had to be someone else who could take the blame for going to the wrong Mass.

As an alcoholic, later, I spent fifteen years of my adult life making excuses, finding someone else to blame for what I was doing.

In the church, I followed the stations of the cross many times. The carvings along the walls were very graphic, and had a powerful effect on my mind. At first, I used to wonder why Jesus never took a punch at his tormenters. How could someone with so much strength that people still worshiped Him be so weak?

But gradually, because I was so weak in the face of my own tormenters, the black Brothers, I began to identify with Him. I learned to disassociate myself from the Brothers, and even from my own parents at times. I could walk into church, with the idea in my head that God was not like their description. And I would talk to God in my own way. We were together, the two of us. Even when I was getting a set of knuckles over the head, or the strap, I got the feeling they were doing it to Him, too.

In that sense, the system did give me a oneness with Jesus that I might not have gotten otherwise. To this day, if I am hurting or being hurt, I feel that God is getting it too. I’ve learned to wait it out, to see what God will do about it. It’s not just me that has to deal with it.

I never understood how it was that Jesus could tell adults that they had to become like little children to enter the Kingdom of God, while we little children were constantly being told how sinful we were. Jesus seemed to be telling us one thing, while adults were telling us the opposite.

Confession meant long lines of...