VOX POPULI Sausages, bloody marys, and praying for the Bears
Garvey, Michael O
VOX populi Michael O. Garvey Early on a frigid morning, hours before a Chicago Bears game, a man leans against the hurricane fence separating Soldier Field's parking lot from Lake Shore Drive. He...
...Or the apparitions of Mary at Medjugorje...
...Or Mother Angelica...
...for the glory of the God who brings such life and such moments about, and for his only begotten Son who forsook his very own life and its similar moments for sheerest and unfathomable love of every last distracted scumbag who would ever enjoy such moments so unworthily, so fitfully, and so ungratefully...
...In thanksgiving for the love of his brothers and friends...
...Or the grotesque manner in which the flag is too often venerated in Catholic churches...
...And he prays a little, too...
...Mystery-the mystery of God, of the world, and of one's own being-animates even the dullest Mass, almost as if to illustrate that there is nothing in all creation so vulgar as to be prophylactic against grace...
...At a somewhat more boisterous tailgate party nearby, a boom box has begun to play a tape of the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women," and the stark, chopping notes of the song's opening bass and drum lead seem to split the joyful moment to its exhilarating pith...
...He is grilling sausage patties with his brothers and a couple of close friends...
...Or the recent "Sixty Minutes" profile of the Catholic church in Los Angeles...
...Popular culture, from Pearl Jam to "Sesame Street" to the National Review, emerges from the volatile no man's land between the cultures of life and death which John Paul wrote about in Evangelium vitae...
...Or the tattoo I saw not long ago of Our Lady of Guadalupe...
...To believe what the church believes about the Incarnation is to believe that there is finally no moment in human experience impervious to the love of God, no aspect of what we are and long for that this love can't search out, infuse, and transfigure...
...A carload of Bears fans honk and wave at him as they speed past, and he toasts them congenially, raising his red plastic cup in salute...
...Or frivolous liturgies...
...for whitecaps churning the surface of a cobalt blue harbor across Lake Shore Drive...
...The parking lot is slowly filling up with Bears fans...
...The Catholic church, the bearer of the most irresistible mystery, withstands popular culture in much the same sense as a storm withstands thunder, a cornfield withstands topsoil, or perhaps even as a baby withstands the womb...
...Or that Gregorian chant compact disk whose New Age cover shows a bunch of monks falling through a blue sky like rain a la Rene Magritte...
...for being alive and in exultant defiance of this arctic morning around this hot charcoal fire with these people...
...On which side of the ledger, for instance, will we place the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius...
...So, alas, does Ed McMahon when he bellows about the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes...
...One prays when one prays, of course, and the point is not simply that grace is available even to an indolent middle-aged man with white trash values...
...Or most of what happens on any given football weekend at Notre Dame...
...Does dance, in fact, in a tentative, middle-aged and utterly clumsy way, pretty much indistinguishable from idle toe-tapping, like that barely noticeable hayseed in the background of Brueghel's Peasant Wedding...
...His hands are thickly gloved against the wind, and big lumps of ice clack against each other in his bloody mary, the sound of them muffled by his cradling fist...
...Everyone is happy...
...for the startling tang of salty tomato juice, Tabasco, and vodka...
...Go Bears...
...he roars...
...Or the pope's visit to Denver...
...for the aromatic steam rising from the hot coffee as he blows the black surface of his cup, making miniature waves of his own...
...The point is the manner in which even the raunchy music of the Rolling Stones-the dissolute rock group whose aging members constitute a sort of Mount Rushmore of sexual and social depravity-can become an instrument of grace...
...Or the Catholic church herself...
...But the Mass isn't merely a cultural artifact, nor is popular culture reducible to "Oprah...
...for the love of his wife and his children back home, still asleep under quilt comforters...
...The plaintive ascension of a Jerry Garcia guitar improvisation, the poignant folly of the regulars in "Cheers," the splendidly ordered violence of a professional football game, are all products of that culture and all strain to express the truth about us and our plight...
...for the peppery taste of still sizzling sausage patties as they burst greasily within split biscuits, hot against the tongue and teeth...
...Which is why, it seems to me, that juxtaposing Catholicism and popular culture is a tricky thing...
...Considered only as a cultural artifact, the average Sunday parish liturgy is not much better than the "Donahue" show and doesn't hold a candle to a Grateful Dead concert...
...Michael O. Garvey works in the public information office at the University of Notre Dame...
...There are tears in his eyes from charcoal smoke, from a Lake Michigan-scraping easterly wind, and from a paroxysm of laughter brought on by an absurd story one of his brothers has just been telling...
...for the goodness of life...
...The man could dance...
...They have fifty-yard-line seats, good winter clothes, bloody marys, a big thermos of scalding hot coffee, and hours of free time to burn...
...Or the Catholic church in Los Angeles...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
