Called Out of Darkness Page 0,30

the rapidly changing sky.

On this particular evening as I walked up Prytania Street to Amelia Street, I caught sight of a huge tree, against the golden light, with its branches catching the breeze. The breeze took hold of the tree, limb by limb, and finally the entire tree, with its countless tiny curling leaves, was moving as if in a great dance.

I knew perfect joy then as I looked at that tree. I knew a joy that was beyond description. All was right with the world. The world made sense. God made us and God loved us; and I'd done a good day's work with the best people I knew and for the best reasons I knew; and here was this magnificent spectacle, this entrancing vision of this simple common tree caught in the simple common miracle of the evening breeze.

I was transported in that moment. No sorrow, no worry, no frustration, meant anything. It was a glorious moment, and I think of it all the time.

Move forward in time eighteen years. I'm a continent away from that spot and that moment; I'm an adult, an atheist. I live in Berkeley, California. I'm married, and I have a beautiful child. I am coming home one evening from the grocery store to our apartment.

And suddenly I look up and see another tree catch the breeze, just as that long-ago tree had done. This is an acacia tree of huge dark branches, and myriad leaves. And the sky is red with evening, and the light is going away. But the tree catches the wind and goes into this great transformative dance.

I stop and stare at this. I watch it. And I think of the long-ago tree in New Orleans outside the convent. And I feel the same sudden transporting joy. Life has meaning. Life has meaning just because this tree is so breathtakingly beautiful and because it can dance this way in the evening breeze. I am filled with happiness. I have no questions.

The next day in Berkeley, California, a man comes to the door and tells me that they are cutting down that acacia tree.

I hear the buzz saws in the background. He is sorry, he says, but it is bringing down the telephone wires. There is nothing to be done. By the time I go out the tree is just about gone.

All of it, all of that mighty tree, cut to pieces and gone.

Later that year my daughter is diagnosed with acute gran-ulocytic leukemia, and she begins to die.

One might ask, Was the moment of seeing that acacia tree a reminder? Was it perhaps a gentle whisper: Remember this: There are dark times coming. Remember this tree and its movements, its abandon, its surrender to the wind. Remember the tree you saw that evening when you were a child.

Remember the joy.
Chapter Five
What does it mean to grow up Cat hollic ?

I entered school in 1947. I left Catholic high school in 1958.

Throughout these years I lived among other Catholics, in a large parish, and just about everyone I knew was Catholic, except for the teachers at the art museum in City Park. What they were I didn't know.

As I've mentioned, our parish had two immense and ornate churches, filled with emblems and tokens of our faith, and a small chapel in the Garden District, "for the rich people," to which we also went.

Our parish had a history. My father and mother had been born in it. Their parents had lived all their lives in it. And it encompassed a special geography of its own, being that it included the richest neighborhood in New Orleans, the Gar-den District, as well as the Irish Channel, which was the poorest white neighborhood of which I knew.

The world was not only solidly Catholic with people crowding the churches for morning Mass every day, it was high spirited, and had its vitally important seasonal events.

In fact, the entire city of New Orleans was involved with these seasonal events, because Mardi Gras was a distinctive part of New Orleans and Mardi Gras was rooted in the church calendar, which was a calendar of seasons in church time and in real time.

I stress this because religion in this world included the world.

Mardi Gras was a celebration which lasted about two weeks, involving beautiful night parades along St. Charles Avenue, of papier-mache floats crowded with rich members of the Mardi Gras clubs, which were called Krewes, and these people, all costumed and glittering, threw glass- or wooden-beaded necklaces