The Yellow Brick Road

As a child, my most exciting moments in church were the times when the priest's `cape' would move slightly to one side and I'd glimpse the golden doors of the `box' as it would glide open. Wow! It was like magic. I couldn't see inside of it, only the back of the priest being very busy `fixing'. There was such a magic about it all that my sister and I would play `mass'. We'd set up the end tables as an altar; and use a yellow dish that resembled a chalice, filled to the brim with candy Necco Wafers that we'd distribute to rails of imaginary people. It even felt magic just pretending.

Then the yellow brick road on the way to Oz lost some of its adventure. It became, instead, a monotonous exercise in trudging through the Baltimore Catechism — pausing momentarily to be filled with grace from the Sacramental faucets in the house of God...a God who knew us, loved us and was waiting for us so that we could be happy with Him forever and ever. Ugh! If happy meant no more sneaking candy or peaking at the TV through the crack of our bedroom door, then God was going to be pretty disappointed after waiting all that time for me to start His happiness, because I probably `wouldn't show'.

About seventh grade, something caught me up and I was drawn to church every morning during Lent. I'd sit there, St. Joseph daily missal in hand, flipping the sections back and forth with colored ribbons. When the sections would move neatly and correctly to the next part, I would feel competent and strangely excited. Filling the air was the Latin used by the priest. The fascination — the fascination of the ritual with the words I didn't understand. Yes, the child had grown a little older but the magic was still there.

Looking back, Good Friday stands out in my mind. I can recall sitting in church on Good Friday from noon to three o'clock. I had taken the family's fifty pound Bible along, and had sat with it on my lap, open to the Passion, trying to read the tiny print in the darkness of the church. In my family, we understood the three hours were sacred, that we shouldn't speak or eat during them, that the time was for thinking about God.

So there I sat, the circulation being cut off in my legs by the weight of the gold-trimmed Bible, trying not to think about anything but God. But there were just so many God-thoughts you could have before you began to think about what you were going to wear on Easter, and what you were going to eat at three o'clock...and the `s' sounds coming from the false teeth of the little old lady sitting a few pews behind as she prayed in reflective s-s-s-silence.

My jaws were clenched as tightly as my fists as I fought between thoughts of Jesus on the cross and the old lady's teeth. And I began to pray that I wouldn't leap out of my pew and pull out her teeth and fling them at the other old lady who would periodically appear at the end of my pew on her pilgrimage around and around and around the stations of the cross.

What was I doing there!!!!! I'd be set to run out when I'd look around and see all the statues draped in purple, illuminated by flickering candle lights; and I'd breathe deeply and take in the smell that can only be described as `church'. My senses were being driven wild by all that was and wasn't there in that moment...as I sat there hypnotized by the indescribable magic of it all.

Deep within I am still a child wanting to return to that far away place from whence I came. And my heart cries out in longing because.........

There's no place like Home,

There's no place like Home,

There's no place like Home.

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