Foto: Della Morte Santissima l'Angelo--Pantheon, BerniniDear Lettye,
° None of this ((ecclesiastical fundraising)) in any way affected life at St. Dolores, for she is so very poor the congregation would commence a deathrattle at the first mention of so much as a nickel. So St. Dolores was free to progress to the one great pleasure of the ecclesiastical Autumn.
° Not Halloween, which always falls a little flat liturgically, though folks’d give a pretty to see the Altar draped in black and orange, and candy corn handed out as jujube on the way back from Communion; not Ognisanti itself (though Maury’s reading of the Poulenc g-minor Organconcerto on the neverneurotic Beckerath came as near to catharsis for Holy Cross (("9/11")) as anything was ever like to do), but All Souls, and the consequent monthlong celebration of Sister Death.
° Here ‘twas at last, comfort from Mother Church. Holy Cross comfort. For Fr. Gaffering, after reminding us who the Poor Souls are--for some of us slept through Catechism Class and thought they had to do with Ralph Cramden and The Honeymooners--urged each of us to adopt one as a sort of Afterlife Buddy, whether we rightly knew his name or not. The deal was this, we pray for our (possibly unknown) Buddy all during November, and when we finally get him bumped from Purgation--how times have changed, it seems we are no longer so much as to form the word Purgatory on our lips, so desperate is Mother Church that we not mistake Dante’s monumental artistic Truth for the truth--and then he, or perhaps it might even be a she (for Mother Church, breaking lockstep with certain other religions one could name, considers that Women, too, have souls, like Men, Cats, and certain species of Birds), will, once in Heaven proper, help pray us out of Purgation. So my question was naturally, how many Buddies is enough?
° I could really only think of one, a neighbour whose pastlife was so colourful folks still talk about it after her death (she was the live girl the unruint politician was anecdotally caught in bed with), nor could I suppose that anybody else on Earth would bother to pray for her, for probate had closed on her estate. (Bimeby I bethought me of others, for one can never have too many Buddies.)
° And I still, occasionally, though Semain is long past, implore the Saints to release M----- and J----- and the other P--r S--ls from their Sisyphean efforts. And it will be Hell to pay if they renege on their end of the contract--albeit like God’s contract with the Jews, I can’t exactly produce their attested signatures--later on, in the sweet by and by.
° Almost better, there were specially marked envelopes inviting one to donate unspecified amounts--this is where St. Dolores could learn a lesson from Tex’s Tip Jar, always best to suggest a figure, folks are so easily led--for Altar supplies in exchange for indulgences for any of our family members currently doing time in Purgatory.
° So I slipped in a tendollar bill for Daddy. Now I know you like a book, I know exactly what you are thinking. “Ten dollars, how much relief could ten dollars buy?!” And you are exactly right. As I sealed the flap I thought to myself, at Oxy Wesley I’d automatically have put in a twenty, and at Assumption I’d’ve been mortified to donate less than a fifty (although U.S. Grant taints that denomination mortally). But so it is, the Poor get poorer. Still, if the envelope’d said, Tex’s TipJarily:
100 years’ indulgence, $10
1000 years’ indulgence, $20
10,000 years’ indulgence, $50
Plenary indulgence, $100
well I just bet St. Dolores’s take would’ve skyrocketed. Ask, says Jesus, and ye shall receive. Don’t ask, and be lucky to get a tenspot.
° I didn’t write Daddy’s name on the envelope. I thought it best to let the Virgin Mother of God determine the recipients of the indulgence, like Angel Tree at Christmas. And I did think that all those thousands of folks burnt to death, crushed to death, fallen to death, smothered to death ((in the World Trade Center))--I did think that all those thousands of Poor Souls could’ve used a little indulgence right about now, and I was sincerely grateful to the Roman Church for being the only religious organisation that offered to provide it.
° For yes, as Catechism so truly says, Purgatory is “a consoling and reasonable doctrine.” Reasonable in that it seeks with Thomian ((Aquinas)) tooclevernessbyhalf to make sense of one of the bizarrest passages in all religious literature,
He preached to the souls in stir,
and consoling in that it relieves the average Joe from any concern with Hell at all. Like that refreshing sign in front of the anaBaptist Church north of Polk:
Remember that Christ died to save Sinners,
good ones and bad ones.
I’d like to see Thom Aquinas himself boil that one down into orthodoxy.
° Yet we know what it means. It expresses the Ripleyism that is the true Faith of all average Joe religionists. Hell is for ‘em. Heaven is for ‘Em. Purgatory will suit us just fine. (For polls, indubitable polls, tell us that while nearly all Americans profess a belief in Heaven, only a hardcore bare third retain a functional belief in Hell. So Purgatory must be the stopgap that fills this discrepancy.)
° And it is consoling to think that our unknown Buddies will accidentally pray us into some diminution of the billions upon billions of years we most likely are scheduled for on Monte Purgatorio.
° And it is consoling to think that though we could do nothing for those of our number about to be blown to smithereens, now that they have been, we can be of assistance.
° And it is sad to think what a loss of peace of mind and of reasonable consolation it is to the schismatic and the heretical branches of the Church that they should deny a reasonable and consoling dogma simply because they have not the least shred of evidence that it is true, or even True.
° For Lord knows, that never stops haemorrhoidal folks from embracing loony and deforming doctrines.
° As witness Timmy McVeigh and the Holy Cross Badasses.
° Well anyhow, I say, Tex’s Bach healed me, the Poor Souls consoled me.
° But what comforted me the most was the certainty that if They ever bomb Kosciusko County, They’ll sure be hurting for a target.
° Nor did I ever once hear of an airplane crash, during fiftyfive years of childhood, without at once hearing the Retort of Common Sense: “Well if they hadn’t gone up in it, they wouldn’t’ve gone down with it.” Which is closely kin to the Retort of Sense of a Guinea Hen: “If God’d meant Man to fly . . . .” And certainly if I ever lose my mind to such an extent that I voluntarily set foot on one of those godforsaken unnatural monstrosities--!
° And even the anthrax held no terror for us countryfolk, for from childhood on we’ve inhaled so many dormant spores of every possible strain of that disease from dusty corrals and barns that if we’d been gonna die from it, we’d’ve done so long since. And had we succumbed, we’d’ve been no deader nor no less dead than anybody else in the fullness of time.
° As Francesco so truly said,
Exspecta modicum et videbis.
° Love, Giac.
Excerpted from Piers trinitatis, iii, ((c)) 2004, Meloncord Press.
