Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

in kind from the weekday lull of the lonely afternoons. This was a peopled silence, like the self-conscious hush of a crowd in a library.
Sunday’s sounds were the sputtering fat of the lamb leg roasting in the oven, the thud of my mother’s knife on the chopping board as she prepared a mountain of vegetables, and the rustle of the thick Sunday papers as my father turned the pages. In the street outside, the neighbors passed by on their way to Mass, their Sunday high heels clip-clipping on the concrete footpath.
In our street, only the women went to Mass; the men stayed in bed with the newspapers or sat by the fridge with a beer. Outwardly, my family fitted the mold of the local Catholic community. I went to Mass with my mother and sister while my father stayed at home. But despite the family’s apparent conformity, I knew that there was something wrong with this picture. My father didn’t go to Mass with us because he wasn’t a Catholic, and that set him perilously apart from the other fathers who didn’t go because they couldn’t be bothered. Those fathers could be forgiven at confession, or at a last-ditch, deathbed repentance. According to the nuns, non-Catholics like my father were heading to hell. At best, they were doomed to languish in limbo, which sounded a lot like spending eternity in a pediatrician’s waiting room, keeping company with all the little babies who died before they could be baptized.
Every night I finished my bedtime prayers with an ardent plea for my father’s imminent conversion. Bargaining a bit, I’d add that if it couldn’t be imminent “could it please be before he dies and You have to burn him in eternal fire?” My father didn’t seem perturbed about his long-term prospects. In fact, he looked extremely content, propped up in bed, as the three of us dressed up to go to church. He was a serene island amid the grumpy bustle as we searched for the shoe polish and fought for a turn at the iron, our moods set on edge by the pre-Communion fast that deprived us of any sustenance. My mother, who fared poorly without her morning cup of tea, was always particularly harassed, struggling to get the lunch in the oven before we set out for the church.
At the age of ten, I decked my room with the gory paraphernalia of Catholicism. An anatomically correct crucified Christ writhed over the dresser, a Sacred Heart dripped blood by the door. My brain itched with the abstract thought required by the Sacred Mysteries. Three persons one God. And the Word was made flesh. I loved the potent metaphor of the litany of Mary: Lily of the Valley, Mystic Rose, Star of the Sea. I studied the ecstatic face in her portrait and longed to be transported by divine grace.
But grace was elusive in Concord. The big church was too hot in summer, its crowd of tight-pressed bodies giving off a must of sweat and cheap perfume. The raw wooden kneelers cut into young knees, leaving angry red indentations on the unprotected flesh of bare legs.
St. Mary’s Church was a huge faux-baroque folly: elements of Bernini’s St. Peter’s basilica scaled down and reinterpreted by a designer of suburban shopping malls. There was a gaudy lushness to it: tons of pink marble, acres of stained glass, pounds of gilt and enough graven images to trigger a new Reformation.
But within this idolaters’ extravaganza the service itself had become as banal as the bingo games held in the adjacent church hall. I could just remember the Latin Mass of my early childhood; the murmured words, the priest with his back turned, doing his sacred work at the altar, the bells, the incense, the atmosphere of a divine mystery from which ordinary people were excluded.
Words like mea culpa and agnus dei and spiritus sanctus had sounded like a magician’s chant; hocus-pocus, abracadabra. There was no such magic in the lawyerly English liturgy, muttered with the sigh of weary housewives and restless children longing to be outdoors.
The Lord be with you.
AND ALSO WITH YOU.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
IT IS RIGHT AND FITTING TO DO SO.
Concord was a large parish and its priests were on the fast track to becoming bishops if they ran things right. Consequently, the men assigned there tended to be a worldly, striving lot, tough men in whom Aussie bluntness had replaced the Irish blarney. They were unabashedly political: conservative anti-Communists, disdainful of women, even though it was women’s devotion that propped up the parish. Rather than offering spiritual uplift, they used their weekly sermons either to harangue us on the importance of wearing hats to Mass and obeying husbands at home, or to complain about the state of the building fund and the size of the haul from the “plate.”
Each week, I waited for the priest to intone the words, “Go in peace, the Mass is ended.” To which I made my only heartfelt response of the morning: “THANKS BE TO GOD.”
The routine of Sunday Mass followed by Sunday roast was so firmly fixed in our family that I thought an enormous baked dinner was a religious obligation of Catholicism. Its ritual feel was heightened because it was the only meal we ate all together around the dining-room table. We sat down to succulent lamb fragrant with vinegary mint sauce, mounds of roasted onions, potatoes and pumpkin slices glistening with fat, big bowls of buttery green beans, peas and grated cabbage.
I watched, fascinated, as my father forked his already grease-drenched potatoes into a soft concave mush and anointed it with lashings of butter that would melt in the depression and form a little yellow lake. Then he piled a Matterhorn of salt at the edge of his plate and dipped each mouthful into it.
Like most families in meat-rich Australia, we enjoyed a household diet that would give a cardiologist a heart attack: lamb chops and