with absolutes, and above all they had found a way to continue day in and day out believing in God.
When my great-aunt, Sister Mary Liguori, died, my eleven-year-old son, Christopher, was a pallbearer at her funeral. We stood with all the other Catholic mourners, and from memory, I followed the prayers. Of course I believed that I could never really be one of these people again. I couldn't believe in God!
But the simple fact was: I did. The world of atheism was cracking apart for me, just as once the world of Catholic faith had cracked apart. I was losing my faith in the nonexistence of God.
I was, however, being doggedly and religiously faithful to an atheism in which I no longer believed. There was a fatal-ism to it. You can't go back to God! Why do you dream of this?
You know too much, you've seen too much, you just can't accept all the social things these people obviously believe. Besides, you know there is no God. The world's meaningless. People have to provide the meaning. You've been writing about this for thirty years!
At some point I began to contribute to the local church the parish church of my childhood - though I never set foot inside. Through that support I became friends with the local Redemptorist Fathers, one of whom was my cousin, though I wasn't a member of the faith.
As I've described, I have a deep devotion to the Redemptorist Fathers. I had never forgotten that my father's seminary education had set him apart from his sisters and brothers, and given him a love of literature and music as well as a spiritual intensity that few around him possessed.
I also became a great collector of religious artifacts, of the life-size statues of the saints that were falling into the hands of antique dealers as old inner-city churches closed across the United States.
I had a perfect place to put all this art. It was a building called St. Elizabeth's Orphanage which I had bought from the Daughters of Charity in the mid-1990s - a vast brick building built between the 1860s and the 1880s that bore a heartbreaking resemblance to the old home of the Little Sisters of the Poor in which I'd wanted so much to be a nun some forty years before.
What was I doing when I bought that building? I lovingly restored its chapel. I bought any plaster saint or virgin or angel anyone offered me. I even discovered, in a French Quarter antique shop, a whole set of the Stations of the Cross which had once hung in St. Alphonsus Church, my very church, and I bought them and ranged them up the main staircase. Yet another ornate set, offered by a country priest, was bought, restored, and ranged along the chapel walls.
In addition to the beautiful Garden District home I'd acquired soon after my arrival, I bought the very house on St. Charles Avenue where our family had lived for a short while before my mother's death. This house had once belonged to the Redemptorist church parish. We'd rented it from them for a short while. It had been before that a priest house, and before that the convent of the Mercy Sisters. It was adjacent to the mansion on Prytania Street that held the Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel where I'd first prayed to God. I bought that building too.
Think of it. Think of buying the building in which you first went to pray, the building that contained your mother's old high school classrooms, the building that contained the chapel in which your mother's Requiem Mass had been said.
From that chapel, my mother's remains had been taken to the graveyard.
I guess I would have bought the graveyard if it had been for sale, as well.
Bit by bit I was picking up the pieces of a Catholic childhood with these significant purchases. I was forming alliances with those still within the fold. I was keeping company with their loving kindness and their daily faith. Yet every step was marked with pessimism, sadness, and a grief on the edge of despair. Every step was marked by darkness - by a tragic certainty that belief in God Himself was quite beyond my conscience and my heart. There was no returning to any church without faith in God.
Beyond the matrix of gilded plaster, stone, and image, there loomed the threat - the ominous and dreadful threat -
of the love of Almighty God.
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed