OTHER VOICES: Selections from Commonweal's Younger Writers Contest
Naffziger, Ann & Urbanski, Grace M. & Dix, Jason A. Spak Tara K.
OTHER VOICES___________ Commonweal's contest for younger writers brought into our offices a rich diversity of voices, some unexpected, others heartening, still others harrowing. Some of the...
...Would anyone really disagree...
...Why are you Catholic...
...It's, um, not using anything artificial, but paying attention to the woman's body to identify times of fertility...
...Being Catholic in contemporary America requires integrating my loves in this world with my love for God...
...I had not taught her these motions...
...She stared as I explained to my four-year-old why there are surveillance cameras at the checkout...
...I don't know," came my lame response...
...She stared as I restrained my two-year-old in something like a half nelson to keep him out of the candy bin...
...I am called to love this world, sinful as it is, and love God well enough to merit seeing him face to face...
...It is difficult to enjoy being in the grocery store, Commonweal 17 September 14, 2001 let alone the world at large, if I feel like an outcast...
...Besides, how can I explain that even though I might disagree with some of the church's teachings, I am committed to "staying in the relationship" because this is my church and my tradition and it still feeds me...
...She gently placed the cruets on the altar and pretended to pour liquid into the chalice...
...you're a girl...
...In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton describes the hunger people had in the 1940s for some accurate and trustworthy spiritual guide to life...
...As I gathered my brood around me, my heart grew heavy with the realization that my life is, indeed, a counter-cultural oddity...
...I am fully immersed in this world...
...We try to teach them about the Mass, so they can better understand what they witness on Sundays, and in our classroom we have a tiny altar...
...I am no otherworldly saint who leads a beautiful life of self-sacrifice and prayer in a secluded hermitage...
...It may be crystal, or Deepak Chopra, or a Taize chant, or a Buddhist meditation, or a candle and a silly book about simplifying life when you're rich...
...Who says the book is closed...
...I think so, and I doubt I'm alone in this...
...The search for authenticity Do we need to have priests...
...Don't you use anything...
...Yes...
...She stared as I comforted my one-year-old, who was crying steadily and wanting a nap...
...Just ask Thomas Aquinas ? Tara K. Dix is a freelance writer from Chicago, Illinois...
...So, who says the church can't change...
...Uh, we, um, use Natural Family Planning," I stammered as my face turned a brilliant shade of red...
...In modern America, that mediating presence is usually not a priestly one...
...And still I treasure my faith in the Catholic church, the people of God—the wonderful, fallible, varied, human people—living both in this world and for the next...
...His answer didn't satisfy me at the time, but now it is mine, too...
...That is not what she was thinking, and I knew it, and she knew it, and the fourteen other people within hearing distance of Aisle 4 knew it...
...As her shocked stupor subsided and she began to ring up my order, the checker in aisle four asked blankly: "You're having another one...
...the editors Why I stay In long conversations with friends about our personal faith journeys, I find myself slowly developing my own apologia for why I remain Catholic...
...Stop sleeping with my husband...
...Their question reminds me that I once asked a Jesuit priest from India why he wasn't Buddhist or Hindu, since he always spoke with great passion and love for those traditions...
...Because I was born into a Catholic family," he said simply...
...Some of the more thought-provoking essays are excerpted below...
...Really, they ask me that...
...It is a human institution, inspired by a living Spirit—how else could it be...
...Then she held up her little plastic host and the little bronze chalice high above her head, and whispered little prayers...
...but my hunger is shaped by culture as well...
...I suppose it helps that I also have had to come up with a response to the perplexed questions of the Protestant women in my graduate theological classes who want to know how I can stay in the Catholic Church as an intelligent woman...
...A deep sadness filled me as I watched her, because I knew that this great potential I saw would, in all likelihood, be rejected...
...Jason A. Spak is a third-year student at the University of Michigan Law School...
...she was imitating what she had seen at Mass, and was obviously unaware that, as it currently stands, she will never be afforded the privilege of the role of consecrator...
...She carefully unfolded the cloth and smoothed it over the table...
...Ann Naffziger is pursuing her Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Biblical Languages at the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley...
...And therein lies our opportunity...
...I hunger because I'm human, of course...
...And if not in my lifetime, then in my children's...
...It is a constant challenge for me, a young Catholic mother, to feel integrated, whole...
...Clearly having classified me as a freak, the checker lost interest about a dozen words into my response and went about her business...
...Born a generation after the 1960s, I've grown up with the feeling that I shouldn't trust the government, the church, the media, or anything else...
...She stared as I wrestled my way around my eight-month-pregnant belly and down to the bottom of the cart to retrieve the economysized box of diapers...
...But it's something...
...This is why we love the pope, even when we disagree with him...
...I had hoped that my reticent response would discourage her and make her return to her work, but I underestimated her horror...
...I teach catechesis of the Good Shepherd in a religious education program for three- to six-yearolds, where we talk about the women, not just the men, who followed Jesus, and we let the children create their own images of God...
...All fourteen bystanders listened intently along with the checker to discover what kind of birth control I had been using (with such obvious ineffectiveness...
...Fully immersed Dhe checker in Aisle 4 at the supermarket stared at me...
...Despite this sadness, I remain optimistic that I will see big changes in the church in my lifetime...
...Who says the booh is closed...
...Unashamed, slack-jawed, she stared at me...
...What is silenced today could be doctrine tomorrow...
...Are you going to stop, then...
...Maybe my daughter will never have to hear the words, "You can't...
...I hunger for religious authority, and my sense is that I am not alone...
...In 1975, Walker Percy wrote that evangelization might not work in half-Christian 1970s America, but it would certainly work in a pagan America in the year 2000...
...The faith that declares that the world is good is the same faith that challenges me to distance myself from many worldly ideas and practices...
...Do we hunger any less today...
...It stands about a foot and a half off the ground, and there are miniature implements to go with it—a chalice, a paten, cruets, candles, and an altar cloth...
...I'd like to trust something, though, and I'm willing to trust the church...
...I can never give them a satisfactory response in the thirty-second time frame they allow, so I usually mumble some cliched answer, knowing that I will probably never be able to explain to them how the church helps me to survive, and to stay reasonably sane in what appears to be an insane world...
...Like him, I know now that being Catholic is in the fiber of my being, just as being American is, and even if I were to leave the church, I know that it would not leave me...
...What's that...
...I'll go further: to be human is to want, or to need, some mediating presence between the world and God...
...I don't get much out of crystals, or Deepak Chopra, or candles, or silly books...
...I asked him...
...Grace M. Urbanski writes from Milwaukee, Wisconsin...
...God knows why, but she needed to know how many children I had decided to have...
...Commonweal 18 September 14, 2001...
...And, apparently, not one more jar of peanut butter was going to pass through the scanner until she had her answer...
...Accustomed to stares as I was, I smiled with all the politeness I could muster and continued to load my institutional-sized groceries on the conveyor belt...
...To be Catholic is to want, or to need, some mediating presence between the world and God...
...After all, when my parents were young the priest faced the wall, spoke Latin, and placed the host on tongues over a Communion rail...
...The church is always growing and living...
...I hunger because in America these days, there really is nothing to believe in...
...Recently, one of the little girls set up the altar by herself and knelt down behind it...
...I thought to myself, but, of course, did not say...
Vol. 128 • September 2001 • No. 15
