Slouching toward Calvary

Every Sunday, I walk down the hill and into town for mass. It sounds like a quaint, pleasant detail from small town life, and it is certainly is that, but it is also something more. Somehow this familiar, twenty-minute walk has become the site of a peculiar agony of the soul, a suffering I both do and do not understand. Let me try to explain.

The first relevant fact is that I am rarely alone on this walk. Some combination of my children is with me: an eight and a ten-year-old boy, or two three-year-olds in a double stroller, or a teenager with a five-year-old and a baby, or some other permutation. Quite often we struggle down the sidewalk in a knot, four or five around me with the stroller, another one or two out ahead, maybe another behind. My wife is never there: she will be back at the house getting herself ready, and glad to have me gone. I remember the first time I took my Sunday walk. She gentled me into it, knowing from experience how emotionally ragged I get on Sunday mornings.

Let me try to explain. When you have this many kids (nine, by one recent count) and neither you nor your wife takes naturally to order or central planning, the process of getting breakfast cleaned up and everyone dressed for mass can be a real Herculean task: matching socks for each child, black shoes for altar boys, unembarrassing hair, no stain of defilement on pants, shirt, fingernails, or face. One boy will have not two but three extra pairs of pants on under his khakis (no reason given!). Another will have a buttonless gap in his oxford, bare skin peeping through beneath, no undershirt. A third, fourth, and fifth will be soiling the knees of their mass pants as they wait for the rest out front, and it is all I can do to get the requisite number out the door without committing a mortal sin, so that my wife can get ready in peace and drive in after us.

So, as I said, I am not usually walking down Bacon Street hill alone. I get it—the exercise of my well-fed body is supposed to ease my rankled soul—but the children do make it difficult. It is a delight to field a child’s question about a tree—“yes, looks like that maple is about to bud”—or a rock, or a street name. But a ceaseless torrent of questions filling the air about my addled head, questions from different boys vying against one another, non sequitur questions leading every which way. I try to keep my cool, two hands on the stroller.

The problem is always, inevitably, the same: things are not going as I would frankly like (why can’t we just walk along in everloving silence?), and a thousand little checks to my will threaten to push me over the edge into bitterness and spite. I am of course trying to pursue a straight line down the sidewalk (don’t they know that?), but a six or seven-year-old is now walking alongside, holding onto the stroller, and steadily shifting us into the road. Another treads slowly in front of us: “watch out,” I warn him, “I’m here on your tail!” He bends over at the last minute, and I fail to avoid his elevated hindquarters, yielding a fall, a scrape, tears, and more bitterness.

But “bitterness” is too shallow and petty to describe it. Biliousness might be better, as it connotes an actual physical state of oppression, a build-up in the soul that you can feel in your gut, corroding the inner pathways of life. When I first read Homer, I found the wrath of Achilles rather puerile and unfamiliar, but now, a few decades down the line, I see my own poor face in the mirror of the Iliad’s opening: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, / hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls . . .” It is of course his own people, the Achaeans, whom his rage injures most—and I see that my own simmering bile makes life hard for my wife and children more than anyone else, but that doesn’t make it any easier to contain. Lurching down the sidewalk, I get a taste of how Simon the Cyrene must have felt (or so I imagine), dragooned at the last minute into thankless labor and suffering, in a drama he could scarcely have fathomed.

Let me try to explain. I know full well that it’s all pride, a heaving sea of pride within, but what good does that knowledge do me in the moment? An acquaintance slows his car in the road beside us, a grandfatherly figure rolling down his window: “hey friend, looks like you’ve got your hands full!” This insightful observation, the undying scourge of all parents of big families, hangs for a moment in the acrid air, as the inland sea of my bile foams up into breakers. “Treasure these moments,” the man adds as he pulls away. I shudder and try to breathe deep, pushing along the straightaway into town. Wretched man that I am, who will free me from this body of death?

The peculiar thing about my condition on the Sunday walk is its characteristic doubleness. I understand—believe me, I understand: I’m being sanctified, and this is what I signed up for in the sacrament of marriage. I understand it all, but understanding is different from the kind of strongly felt, whole-personal knowing we sometimes experience. There’s a line people attribute to Yogi Berra about theory and practice: “in theory, there is no difference between them. In practice, there is.” And in my own kitchen a couple of years back, my son Ollie asked me, “Dad, how many theories do you have?” “I don’t know,” I said, “why do you ask?” “Well,” he said, “every time we have company over, at some point you say, ‘So I have a theory about that . . .’” And indeed, I’m more comfortable with the odorless coolness of deep thoughts than I am with deep, pungent humanity. I think, there on Bacon Street, in the heat or the drizzle or the snow, “I could write about this: I’m practically a symbol of the late-modern, bourgeois ego-drama.” But that doesn’t help me at the moment. My abstract mind is painfully alienated from the concrete fact of my temporal, embodied existence. I’ve got my hands full.

The doubleness goes further, though. I know and believe that it’s good to have kids, that these very children are making me a better man right now. But do they have to cause my delicately attuned soul this much suffering? I know, I know, that Léon Bloy was right: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.” I believe it, and yet the heart that believes is caught up in this particular fleshly body, walking down Bacon Street in company, and the gulf between thought and feeling is part of what makes the Sunday morning experience so surreal and disorienting.

As we push along, I try to pray the rosary. Perhaps its simple, chiming poetry will focus my thoughts, cool my seething passions. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth—“Dad, who’s that man? Why does he look mad at us?” Give us this day our daily bread—“Dad, are we having donuts after mass? Why not?!” Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee—“what did he mean you have your hands full? You aren’t carrying anything!” The rosary, comfort of the saints, is also for now folded into all the rest of this vertiginous doubleness. I cannot see past it. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Our caravan just makes the light at the last intersection. We cross and turn left. There is the church, cool in summer, and warm in winter. My children somehow quiet down now—this has happened every week for years—as we hear the choir warming up in the balcony behind us. Easing down onto the kneeler, it now feels like the last twenty minutes are a kind of image of my life hitherto, a pilgrimage to the altar, an ascent to the cross. No more explaining is wanted. “It is the darkness of the spiritual Calvary,” says Bloy, “which pours over our souls the tender light of our wonderful Savior.” The opening hymn begins. The first few prayers roll over me. Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison.