Binding and Loosing

The term “lapsed Catholic” is used too much these days. I hate to be a Pearly Gatekeeper, but I feel I have to say something before the phrase loses all meaning, and then people like me do not get to use it. Every once in a while, a little parochialism helps. “Lapsed Catholic” cannot become too, well, catholic. If folks want to use a term like ex-Catholic, fine. Maybe “Expired Catholic” could work, too, if  faith can be said to go bad. But lapsed is different. It implies that, at some point, you were doing everything you could to be part of an organization. Being dragged to church several times, then not going again, does not count. Where was the commitment, let alone the communion? Did this belief exist on certain Sundays and then “lapse” for the rest of the time in between?

Not all lapsed Catholics have to grow up exactly like me. There can be some flexibility. My upbringing was on the more extreme side. I ate off plates painted with John Paul II’s portrait, went to confession during vacations, and graduated satis bene from St. Januarius High School. Yet I feel these things give me a kind of “ex” cathedra to speak from.  They show that it took a lot for me to break out of the faith I was ensconced in. To be a lapsed Catholic is, therefore, as serious a business as being a Catholic. When others appropriate this struggle and claim it as their own, it diminishes all I had to overcome.

Why would anyone do this? I have my theories. First, it can ward off proselytizers. They tend to focus on those with a spiritually blank slate. Saying you are a lapsed Catholic implies a lot of baggage an evangelist knocking on doors might be unwilling to unpack.  Secondly, it can help one fit in with other lapsed Catholics. Certain fields, such as stand-up comedy, creative writing, and the CIA, are rife with us. Thirdly, and I hate to go here, being a lapsed Catholic is a good excuse to explain away particular sexual hang-ups or inadequacies. I know someone who gave a less-than-satisfactory donation during his audition for a sperm bank. When the doctor saw the result and winced, my friend, without missing a beat, said he was a lapsed Catholic despite being raised a Presbyterian. 

It is a matter of basic fairness. I was raised in a completely different world than these so-called lapsed Catholics. None of them had to stay up late for a midnight mass, memorize the prayers of the rosary, or spend Spring break in Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting in line to soak a cotton ball in the holy oil dripping off a clammy statue of the Virgin Mary. But it is the little differences that matter as well. Those experiences compound daily, though when you are raised Catholic, the rates are not usurious. Maybe they are the true building blocks of what it means to be anything. Being a New Yorker is more about the times spent trying to squeeze through closing train doors instead of standing in line for the Empire State Building.

For instance, these pseudo-apostates never had the same bedtime reading that I did. One particularly bad book I endured was called The Testament of a Tree. Hardly anyone seems to have heard of it. But when I mention The Testament of a Tree to my support group? Their heads all bow like we are back at Mass, and the priest has just uttered the names of three Divine Persons. Then we shudder like holy rollers. Even when I was a believer, I hated the story. I hated its author, too: Sister Joseph Bernadette O’Malley, a member of the Oblate Missionary Sisters of the Seamless Robe of Christ. My father, Aloysius Nardolilli, insisted that he read it to us at least once a week.

Since it was a gift for my first holy communion, I was supposed to have the right to refuse to let anyone else read it. But The Testament of a Tree became my brother Aloysius Jr.’s favorite book, and his love for the story overrode my protests. All I could do was lie still on my side of the bed, dreading those opening words:

Etzy the tree began his life as a seed in ancient times, long ago in the Holy Land.

If I tried to cover my ears for the rest, Aloysius Jr. would pull my arms away. Then, I had to hear the rest of the familiar opening. About how:

He grew slower than his older siblings. And not because he was lazy; he was in their shade!  One day, a carpenter noticed how much smaller Etzy was than the rest of the trees and thought the wooden runt would make a good leg for a table. The carpenter raised his axe to chop Etzy, but he was stopped by a young boy. He was the carpenter’s son.

Aloysius Jr. liked to speak in the boy’s voice, especially after he memorized his lines.

Please, Father, he said, spare this sapling from your axe. Such a small tree deserves a chance to grow. One day, he will be good enough for better things, I’m sure.

Well, that was enough to convince the carpenter to leave Etzy alone. So, Etzy grew and grew as you can imagine and was just as tall as the other trees after only a couple of years. The Cedars of Lebanon must be a precocious lot. Sister Joseph Bernadette depicted this as a happy time for Etzy.

He loved to hear the songs of the birds who had nests in his branches. He also liked to feel the squirrels running up and down his trunk. They tickled him.

But being big was now to his detriment. 

Why? Enter the Romans:

A group of legionnaires came along and saw Etzy. It’s good enough, one of them said. They all agreed. They took out their axes and chopped poor Etzy down. The tree fell with a mighty crash. The soldiers then chopped off the leaves, branches, and roots. All the animals who had been friends with Etzy were sad. The birds chirped, and the squirrels dug into the ground to hide. Soon, Etzy was just a pile of wood. None of his friends could recognize him. 

I am not sure how Etzy maintained his consciousness, but the story told us the former tree was completely aware of everything that happened to him. Every broken branch, trampled root, or cut on his trunk. After he was sliced up, Etzy could still somehow see he was being taken to a city and that he was in multiple pieces. How did one of them still manage to contain his soul? It was unclear to me even as a child. Once his journey stopped, the soldiers-

-combined two of the larger pieces of him to make a cross. Then they took a smaller piece to write INRI on it and attached it to the top. Near the bottom, they fashioned another part of Etzy into a suppedaneum.

Which any good Catholic, lapsed or otherwise, will tell you is a footrest. All through this ordeal, Etzy was scared, alone, and in pain. He thought no one could understand what he was going through. But that all changed when the soldiers brought a man out to him.

His robe had been taken from him, and he had a crown made of thorns on his head. He had a beard, too. Etzy looked into his eyes and realized who it was. It was the boy! The one who saved him from the carpenter’s axe! Etzy wished he still had his branches to hug this man. He wondered why he was being brought to him now. Was the young boy coming back to finish the job his father wanted to start?

At this point during story time, I would try to convince my father I was too asleep to make reading The Testament of a Tree worthwhile for my spiritual edification. It never worked. Maybe he was too engrossed with what was about to happen. Maybe he wanted to placate Aloysius Jr., who by now was usually sitting upright on his side of the bed.   

Etzy was sad as soon as the man was taken away from him. He watched as one of the Roman soldiers took out a whip and brought it down on the man’s back. Oh no! It was not like the whip cracked above horses to make them go farther. This one was a scourge. It had three leather straps, and each one contained two lead balls. This made them go down faster, so when the straps came up, they ripped off the skin of the poor man.  

The book was illustrated, but it never said who did the drawings. I suppose that means Sister Joseph Bernadette did them herself. At this point, there was a picture of Etzy, as a cross on the ground, looking up at Jesus while a Centurion turned his back into a kind of red confetti. Then, on the next page, Etzy saw the result, just like me. Each time I saw it, my young mind immediately thought of prosciutto. The Sister’s last name may have been O’Malley, but she could not fool me. She was clearly a paisana. After the whipping, we continued to the main event.

40 lashes later, the man was taken over to Etzy. Etzy rolled and wobbled as he was brought down to him. Once he was balanced, Etzy felt the man bleeding on top of him. He was sad, but at the same time, he was a little bit glad too. This man knew what Etzy had gone through with the axe.

Good for Etzy, I suppose. But it was not the end of their painful communion.

The man was very soft,almost like pulp. Etzy wondered why they were using him as a bed to support the man. Soon, he realized that being a bed was not the soldiers’ plan. They took iron nails and hammered them right through the wrists of the man. It hurt him a great deal as the metal broke his blood vessels, sliced through his muscles, and shattered his bones into tiny pieces. The tips of the nails went all the way through, and then Etzy felt them, too.

The illustrations continued to bring the crucifixion to life. One of the pictures depicted a closeup of the path the nail took. It used red lines to show the pain, much like an ad for arthritis medication. As gory as a crucifix in church can get, it tries to leave something to the imagination. Martyrdom is shown on the macro level, not a microscopic one. Mercifully, the Sister did not include a similar picture of the nails hammered into Jesus’ feet.

On the following page, Etzy was lifted up with Jesus, who was hanging from him.

The pain both of them felt was terrible. Etzy had no bark to protect him from the nails in his wood. And Jesus! Jesus was feeling just as bad. He told God to forgive the men who did this to him.  It was really hard for him, though. He kept trying to push himself up in order to breathe because he did not have enough support to move his diaphragm all the way up and down. His lungs were filling with fluid, too. This all just hurt him more. When he went up, he put pressure on the nails on his feet, and in order to avoid this pain, he put pressure on the median nerves in his arms. Etzy realized this man could not catch a break! 

The next pages were dark in terms of color.

His heart started to give out, too. It did not have enough blood to pump through his veins. He told everyone it was finished, and then he grew cold. He was dead.

There was no text on the following pages. They showed Jesus getting poked with a stick and his lifeless body being taken down off the cross. Etzy was lowered as well. Jesus’ family wrapped him up and put him in a tomb. Meanwhile, Etzy was chopped up again and used to feed a fire under one of the Roman bathhouses. My father liked to make a big show by closing the book and saying that was it and that the story was over. My brother knew the truth. I did, too. He demanded my father read the rest. I was silent. This was one fiction of my father’s that I could believe in.

But then Etzy woke up again. He was surrounded by a bright glow. He had no idea where he was. He reached out for his branches, hoping to collect some of the light shining with his leaves. He had none. He was no longer a tree, and yet he was not a cross either. He was much smaller. What was it? Etzy was a splinter! But he was also stuck in something. What could it be? Eventually, the light faded, and he realized he was in a room full of mirrors. When he looked closely into the reflection, Etzy saw the boy who saved him and the man he thought he had died with. All of them are together now. And you know why? Because he was a glorious, golden splinter that had gotten stuck in the Lord’s back! 

I must admit that the illustrations at this point were especially florid and gorgeous. But they failed to accurately render the anatomical specifics of Etzy’s situation. He was either in the Lord’s shoulder or his lumbar region. Thankfully, my brother grew older and lost interest in the book. He is a Pagan now, something he got into while in the Marines. Our mother says he has a shrine of some sort to Ares or Thor. He could very well call himself a lapsed Catholic, too. He earned that right alongside me while listening to our father read The Testament of a Tree. It doesn’t matter what he believes now. An old creed never fully leaves you, even if your Sundays are now completely free, just like a splinter buried too deep under your skin.