Tuesday, October 6, 2020
Chuck Silva
Remember
Born to an Irish Catholic family in eastern Massachusetts, I was at birth assigned two irrevocable religious identities: (1) Roman Catholic and (2) Red Sox fan. (I wrestled a bit with the correct order.) I embraced each. During the summer we played baseball every day it was not raining, and on Sundays we went to mass whether it was raining or not. I became an altar boy at the earliest age permitted by canon law, and within a year was one of the “go-to” altar boys for weddings (somewhat lucrative) and funerals (not at all lucrative but we got to miss school). Our family was close to the parish clergy, my parents served on the parish council, and the Church was just a big, big part of our lives.
My relationship with the Red Sox was to continue regardless of their success, but my relationship with the Church waned as I became older. As is commonly the case, I began to read the Catholic liturgy and the Old and New Testaments more critically and – big surprise - soon concluded that there was no way I could rationally conclude that they contained more than a trace of historical truth and that, deprived of any meaningful pretensions to historical reality, the entire business lacked any unique claim to moral or ethical authority. (I know, right?) I went away to college, majored in philosophy, and thought little of my Catholic identity. I (of course) took courses in comparative religion, and concluded broadly that while it was all very interesting from an academic standpoint, I was better off focusing on other subjects with firmer rational roots, or of greater practical significance. My relationship with the Church never disappeared completely, but it gradually faded over time to comparative insignificance.
* * *
As I write this, I am on a long-distance, solo cross-country trip, heading to Denver where Meg will join me to visit our daughter Nora. What I had assumed would be a feast of new images and experiences has instead turned out to be an orgy of remembering. Every “new” image or experience triggers an avalanche of memories of similar events, images, voices. Driving, I note the grain elevators along Route 30, the plumes of chaff from the combines harvesting soy beans and corn, the large maple in the yard of the trim white farmhouse, and the red barns with their rusting metal roofs, but within moments I am not experiencing Iowa, but rather actively remembering our farm in upstate New York – the corn browning in my neighbor’s field; my daughters shrieking as I push them on the swing hanging from the tree in our pasture; the metal roofs of our own barns picking up the rich crimson of the setting sun.
And so it was the first time we attended a service at St. John’s. The images, the words, the ritual – it all triggered many welcome memories, but even greater was the immediate and overpowering remembering of the feeling of community - what it meant to be a member of a group of people earnestly and constantly seeking not only to be better human beings, but to be better human beings for each other, and for everyone.
Over time, I remembered that irrevocable identity assigned to me at birth – not Roman Catholic, but something perhaps a little more basic – that of being a human being in a sea of human beings trying to figure out how to be and how to act. And I remembered that this is one long-distance voyage best not attempted solo, but as a member of a community of other human beings trying to figure out answers to these same questions.
And also (but of far less importance) that whole Red Sox thing.