2001 CONFESSIONS
December
November
October
September
July/August
June
May
April
March
February
January

Little Notes
Letters

Talk About Movies
Roamin' Catholic
Follow Me




Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

MARCH 2001 CONFESSIONS

STUPID PRIDE

Driving around my hometown this Christmas, I was struck by the number of Marian statues I noticed adorning front yards, proclaiming the households' Catholicism to every passerby. Upon reflection, I suppose it's not so surprising. If I have my history right, my town is laden with descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants, simple -- not to say superstitious -- Catholics who treasured these material reminders of the immaterial world, and probably looked on them as wholesome décor besides. Some of those statue-displayers may have been superstitious -- I have heard stories of curious beliefs and practices. If you made a request of St. Joseph and he was slow to answer it, you could expedite matters if you buried a statue of him upside down. Sometimes, folks would steal the statue from a church, holding the saint hostage. I smile when I imagine the scene in the confessional: "Father, I'm the one who stole St. Joseph. I needed a new roof... and... I buried him upside-down." What to say?

My family didn't go in for such practices, and I don't remember many statues growing up. My first memorable experience with a statue came during a pilgrimage I took with my mother during my senior year of high school. While visiting St. Francis' basilica in Assisi, our tour group was introduced to a statue of Francis adjacent to the cloister walk. The stone statue held a stone birds' nest, but the bird in the nest, though motionless, was alive. After a while, another bird alighted on the nest's edge, and the two switched places like sentries at a post. The guide informed us that the nest was never empty, that one bird always replaced another. As miracles go, it almost seems silly -- but there it is, gaining value from its superfluity.

Then, while I was in college, my parents placed a white plaster statue of Mary in our living room, and began saying their rosary in front of it every night. At the end of their rosary, they would offer prayers for Our Lady's intentions at Medjugorje. As the months went by, the statue acquired a dusting of gold flecks, concentrated in the folds of her robe and about her face; the flecks remain to this day. This is no proof of the apparition, but it is extraordinary. Even if it was the work of some demon seeking to lead souls astray, it is a shocking evidence of the supernatural, shocking because it happened in my childhood home.

Then there was the climbing rose in my parents' neighbor's yard that wound its way over the fence and cascaded down around my mother's Marian shrine, surrounding Mary with a nimbus of yellow roses. The neighbor cut the rose back in an effort to retrain it so that it would aim its blooms toward her -- it never quite grew back.

Still, our statues were backyard statues; our devotion was not so public as the front-yarders, or as an acquaintance who harvested a life-size Mary and Joseph from a church and set them up in her dining room (!) So, I was uneasy when my wife suggested a saint's statue for our front yard. I think I wanted roses for the centerpiece, and then my wife thought of a trellis, and under the trellis ... St. Therese, the great giver of roses. I hesitated. Was it too public, too aggressive? We are the only churchgoing Catholics on our cul-de-sac. There are a couple of lapsed Catholics -- would they see it as an accusation? Would they think we were proclaiming our piety? Was I hesitating out of stupid pride, secretly ashamed to be associated with the superstitious and uneducated (who might be far holier than myself)?

I was not at all comfortable with the idea, and then I was. I suppose there is no explanation for it, other than grace. I started looking for a St. Therese statue. I didn't find one I liked, but while shopping for roses at Hunter's Nursery in Lemon Grove, I came across a St. Joseph that seemed perfect. I bought him almost on impulse, and set him up under the trellis in a pounding rain as soon as we got home. Suddenly, it was obvious -- time and again during the buying and refinancing and remodeling and relandscaping, we had offered prayers to St. Joseph that all would go well, and all had gone well. And suddenly, there I was, right back with my immigrant forbears and their prominent statues.

I have no idea how it has been received. People have praised the front yard, but no one has mentioned the statue. The only possible clue: during a discussion of the Christian church which several of my neighbors attend, someone joked to my wife about the possibility of my "converting." "Oh, no," chortled another neighbor, "he's Catholic all the way."

TOP