History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi

Author:Robert A. Orsi
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780674047891
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Six

THE HAPPINESS OF HEAVEN

THE playground of my Catholic school in the north Bronx in the early 1960s was a vicious place. It seems silly to say this in light of the much greater horrors of the world, then and since, but the playground was real and immediate to me, and it was dangerous ground. Two children in particular, male cousins from the forbidding neighborhood behind the church, whirled through the playground like demons, before and after school each day, punching and howling, and tearing at other children’s clothes and faces.

I watched a circle of boys urinate on a classmate after school one afternoon, a much-tormented boy, whom they had pushed to the asphalt at their feet in the playground. Where were the nuns, who at other times seemed to be everywhere? The boy writhed and screamed under the hot flow, and then pulled himself up, dripping and foul, to make his way home alone through the gridded shadows under the tracks of the elevated train on White Plains Road.

* * *

In the revised 1941 edition of the Baltimore Catechism, the compendium of Catholic doctrine in the form of questions and answers that parochial school children in the United States, including those tormenting and being tormented in the Bronx, were made to memorize word for word in the middle years of the twentieth century, the word “heaven” appears for the first time in the fourth question, “What must we do to gain the happiness of heaven?”1

* * *

With the other good boys, I mostly accepted the playground’s savagery as a normal part of everyday life. But sometimes it became too much for me. Then, if I could get away without being seen—it would have drawn the feral cousins shrieking down on me—I slipped into church through the side door that opened onto the playground. I was an altar boy and so I knew my way around the back hallways and hidden corridors of the church. I crossed the sacristy, where the vestments, chalice, and wine for Mass were stored, crept behind the main altar, past the choir stalls where the friars chanted the morning office, to a side chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua. The chapel glowed from within with a deep red luminescence, the light from the racks of flickering votive candles burning before the saint. The old women of the neighborhood, and sometimes their husbands and sons, lit the candles, and old women, dressed in black and murmuring over thick prayer books and beads, were mostly the only people I ever saw in the chapel in the middle of the day, when other adults were at work. The place smelled sweetly of incense, candle wax, and the old women’s soap.

* * *

The answer is, “To gain the happiness of heaven we must know, love, and serve God in this world.”

* * *

The blood pounded in my ears in the chapel’s immense silence until I calmed down and my eyes adjusted to the smoky gloom, and then the playground’s grip eased on my heart at last.

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