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canyonwalkerThree months ago I started telling the story of the church up the hill. Except for most of my life it was the mystery of the church up the hill.
I grew up in a Catholic family, and we lived in a neighborhood where there was a Catholic church right up the hill from us. It was easy walking distance, about 3 blocks. But we almost never attended that church, at least not that I remember. Instead we were regular parishioners at the Catholic church in the next town over— a church a 20 minute car trip away, in a town we never lived in.
It always seemed strange to me, "Why don't we attend the church almost literally in our back yard—" the strip of land immediately behind our back yard was literally owned by the church— "Instead of driving to another city?" I asked my parents many times. The answers they gave never made sense. It wasn't until I was in my 40s, and my father was on his deathbed, that I pieced together the truth to unravel this mystery.
Follow me through the jump for the rest of the story.
When I asked my parents why we didn't attend the nearby church it was never my father who answered. I mean, he'd sometimes answer in a nonverbal growl. But never in words. It was always my mom who'd try to explain.
"Your father doesn't like that church because the way they celebrate mass is too modern," she'd explain. Well, sometimes she'd explain it that way. Sometimes when her own answer wasn't an exasperated nonverbal sigh indicating that she didn't have patience to answer a child's question.
"How is it too modern?" I asked many times, earnestly. I was old enough to be curious about the faith my parents were raising me in.
"They play guitar there," my mom elaborated once or twice. Plus, I'd seen— and heard— the guitar once or twice on the rare occasions, once every year or two, we did attend services there. "Your father doesn't like guitar."
BTW, if you're thinking, "I'm familiar with the Catholic church, and that sounds like a dumbass excuse!" you're not alone. Even precocious 7 year old me found that explanation lacking, let alone cynical 14 year old me.
Part of the reason is that there's nothing inherently un-Catholic about a guitar. It's just a musical instrument. If you're claiming, "Oh, but it's not traditional!" I'll challenge you to explain when the tradition you're thinking of started. Because the church my dad preferred played its music on an electric organ, and there certainly wasn't one of those around 2,000 years ago when the Catholic church was founded. You know what instrument was around 2,000 years ago? A lyre. Which is waaay closer to an acoustic guitar than any kind of organ, electric or otherwise.
Choice of musical instruments aside, there could be differences in how two Catholic churches celebrate mass. But that was the other part of my dissatisfaction with my parents' answer. There wasn't a material difference in how the priests at these two churches celebrated. Services followed the same structural order, with the same readings and prayers, and comparably pious homilies. There was nothing actually "modern" about the church up the hill. In fact they even had an organ, too— and a much better and more traditional one, too: an actual pipe organ. The church we attended had an electronic synthesizer that played through a loudspeaker.
So, with the "too modern" claim shot to shit, what's left as a reason to avoid the church up the hill? The reasons for that tie back to some of my earliest memories. When I was 4 years old my dad lost his job.
My dad was a store manager at a company that shut down a bunch of its stores. It was during a recession, so a new job was tough to find. I think my dad was out of work for months.
I say I think because my memories from that time— i.e., when I was 4 years old— are spotty. My memories are strong from age 5 on. In fact my first age 5 memory is from my 5th birthday (so, literally Day One of being 5 🤣) when I thought about what the past year had been like and realized that it seemed to have passed in a flash.
Among the memories I do have from that time are my parents working odd jobs.
My dad took a job cleaning the local movie theater after the late show. My mom would help him sometimes so it wouldn't take until dawn. And when she helped that means my oldest sister and I went along with her, at 1am, because hiring an overnight baby sitter likely would have cost as much as the meager wages the job paid.
Curiously one of my snapshot memories from back then was how full our Shop-Vac heavy duty vacuum cleaner would get from sucking up the discarded popcorn. Back then people were pigs and would routinely throw their leftover drinks and popcorn on the floor. I mean, that's always been a fact of life that people are slobs in movie theaters, but back in 1976 it seemed worse. It seemed like the Shop-Vac was always full. And the floors in the theater were so sticky. I remember how sticky they were from the frick-frick-frick sound the soles of our shoes made as my sister and I ran back and forth across the rows at 2am.
The work my parents did to make ends meet for a few months wasn't glamorous, but they did make ends meet. Another one of my snapshot memories from that time is my parents high-fiving over my head while I played, saying, "We paid the mortgage this month!"
Though they didn't really make ends meet. They kind of faked it. They faked it by going into debt on credit cards.
Among my snapshot memories from back then were a number of trips to the local drugstore that sold some groceries. Why do I have so many memories of us going there instead of the regular grocery store? It's because the drug store took credit cards but the grocery store did not, my mom explained decades later. Mom and Dad bought as much as they could on credit cards to make the paltry income from odd jobs like mopping the movie theater at 1am stretch further.
The consequence of going into debt on credit cards, BTW, was that they fell into a hole it took them decades to climb out of. Credit cards can be a great tool for consolidating expenses, as I do, paying in full every month. They're also a great help when you're hit with expenses now that you expect you can pay off later— as I did personally as a young adult. But the risk of carrying debt too long is that you may never get out of it. My parents got into a debt cycle with their credit cards in 1976 and didn't get out of it until literally 40 years later.
I could go on longer about credit cards but I'm going to leave it at that because credit cards aren't the point of this story. The point is the odd jobs my dad did to help pay the bills— and how that's related to the mystery of the church up the hill my family avoided for 40 years.
The "confession", as it were, was my dad reminiscing about when my oldest sister and I were little kids. I shared my memories of the movie theater with the sticky floor and the Shop-Vac overflowing with popcorn.
Dad added how one of his jobs was painting the church.
"I asked the pastor for help while I was out of work," Dad narrated. "He said I could paint his church and he paid me. Ultimately I paid him back every cent."
Those last few words stuck with me— I paid him back every cent. Why did my father need to pay the man back? He did a job, he got paid. The money was his. He earned it. But instead he viewed it as charity.
Dad worked for weeks painting that church, maybe even longer. I remember the paint cans and brushes he used lingering in our house for years. I never understood as a little kid why we had so many paint cans. I mean, I was young enough that my dad's bullshit explanation, "They're for painting," still made sense to me. But painting what? We didn't paint in our house until several years later, when all the old paint cans were long gone.
That was why my dad avoided going to church services at the church up the hill. Because he felt ashamed that he'd been in need. Because even though he bent his back and put in honest workdays for weeks he felt that the pastor took pity on him as a charity case. And possibly because he worried that other members of the parish would now view him as less than them, not a member of the parish in equal spiritual standing but merely the building's janitor.
The financial debt he incurred on those credit cards in 1976 took 40 years to pay off. The spiritual debt he incurred, he never paid off.
I grew up in a Catholic family, and we lived in a neighborhood where there was a Catholic church right up the hill from us. It was easy walking distance, about 3 blocks. But we almost never attended that church, at least not that I remember. Instead we were regular parishioners at the Catholic church in the next town over— a church a 20 minute car trip away, in a town we never lived in.
It always seemed strange to me, "Why don't we attend the church almost literally in our back yard—" the strip of land immediately behind our back yard was literally owned by the church— "Instead of driving to another city?" I asked my parents many times. The answers they gave never made sense. It wasn't until I was in my 40s, and my father was on his deathbed, that I pieced together the truth to unravel this mystery.
Follow me through the jump for the rest of the story.
When I asked my parents why we didn't attend the nearby church it was never my father who answered. I mean, he'd sometimes answer in a nonverbal growl. But never in words. It was always my mom who'd try to explain.
"Your father doesn't like that church because the way they celebrate mass is too modern," she'd explain. Well, sometimes she'd explain it that way. Sometimes when her own answer wasn't an exasperated nonverbal sigh indicating that she didn't have patience to answer a child's question.
"How is it too modern?" I asked many times, earnestly. I was old enough to be curious about the faith my parents were raising me in.
"They play guitar there," my mom elaborated once or twice. Plus, I'd seen— and heard— the guitar once or twice on the rare occasions, once every year or two, we did attend services there. "Your father doesn't like guitar."
BTW, if you're thinking, "I'm familiar with the Catholic church, and that sounds like a dumbass excuse!" you're not alone. Even precocious 7 year old me found that explanation lacking, let alone cynical 14 year old me.
Part of the reason is that there's nothing inherently un-Catholic about a guitar. It's just a musical instrument. If you're claiming, "Oh, but it's not traditional!" I'll challenge you to explain when the tradition you're thinking of started. Because the church my dad preferred played its music on an electric organ, and there certainly wasn't one of those around 2,000 years ago when the Catholic church was founded. You know what instrument was around 2,000 years ago? A lyre. Which is waaay closer to an acoustic guitar than any kind of organ, electric or otherwise.
Choice of musical instruments aside, there could be differences in how two Catholic churches celebrate mass. But that was the other part of my dissatisfaction with my parents' answer. There wasn't a material difference in how the priests at these two churches celebrated. Services followed the same structural order, with the same readings and prayers, and comparably pious homilies. There was nothing actually "modern" about the church up the hill. In fact they even had an organ, too— and a much better and more traditional one, too: an actual pipe organ. The church we attended had an electronic synthesizer that played through a loudspeaker.
So, with the "too modern" claim shot to shit, what's left as a reason to avoid the church up the hill? The reasons for that tie back to some of my earliest memories. When I was 4 years old my dad lost his job.
My dad was a store manager at a company that shut down a bunch of its stores. It was during a recession, so a new job was tough to find. I think my dad was out of work for months.
I say I think because my memories from that time— i.e., when I was 4 years old— are spotty. My memories are strong from age 5 on. In fact my first age 5 memory is from my 5th birthday (so, literally Day One of being 5 🤣) when I thought about what the past year had been like and realized that it seemed to have passed in a flash.
Among the memories I do have from that time are my parents working odd jobs.
My dad took a job cleaning the local movie theater after the late show. My mom would help him sometimes so it wouldn't take until dawn. And when she helped that means my oldest sister and I went along with her, at 1am, because hiring an overnight baby sitter likely would have cost as much as the meager wages the job paid.
Curiously one of my snapshot memories from back then was how full our Shop-Vac heavy duty vacuum cleaner would get from sucking up the discarded popcorn. Back then people were pigs and would routinely throw their leftover drinks and popcorn on the floor. I mean, that's always been a fact of life that people are slobs in movie theaters, but back in 1976 it seemed worse. It seemed like the Shop-Vac was always full. And the floors in the theater were so sticky. I remember how sticky they were from the frick-frick-frick sound the soles of our shoes made as my sister and I ran back and forth across the rows at 2am.
The work my parents did to make ends meet for a few months wasn't glamorous, but they did make ends meet. Another one of my snapshot memories from that time is my parents high-fiving over my head while I played, saying, "We paid the mortgage this month!"
Though they didn't really make ends meet. They kind of faked it. They faked it by going into debt on credit cards.
Among my snapshot memories from back then were a number of trips to the local drugstore that sold some groceries. Why do I have so many memories of us going there instead of the regular grocery store? It's because the drug store took credit cards but the grocery store did not, my mom explained decades later. Mom and Dad bought as much as they could on credit cards to make the paltry income from odd jobs like mopping the movie theater at 1am stretch further.
The consequence of going into debt on credit cards, BTW, was that they fell into a hole it took them decades to climb out of. Credit cards can be a great tool for consolidating expenses, as I do, paying in full every month. They're also a great help when you're hit with expenses now that you expect you can pay off later— as I did personally as a young adult. But the risk of carrying debt too long is that you may never get out of it. My parents got into a debt cycle with their credit cards in 1976 and didn't get out of it until literally 40 years later.
I could go on longer about credit cards but I'm going to leave it at that because credit cards aren't the point of this story. The point is the odd jobs my dad did to help pay the bills— and how that's related to the mystery of the church up the hill my family avoided for 40 years.
Painting the Church
The final pieces of the puzzle only fell into place when my dad was in his last few weeks of life. It was almost a deathbed confession. I say almost because it wasn't a confession. My dad didn't come clean on the truth of the story. He merely gave me the second-to-last more piece of the puzzle. I still had to get the final piece and then put it all together.The "confession", as it were, was my dad reminiscing about when my oldest sister and I were little kids. I shared my memories of the movie theater with the sticky floor and the Shop-Vac overflowing with popcorn.
Dad added how one of his jobs was painting the church.
"I asked the pastor for help while I was out of work," Dad narrated. "He said I could paint his church and he paid me. Ultimately I paid him back every cent."
Those last few words stuck with me— I paid him back every cent. Why did my father need to pay the man back? He did a job, he got paid. The money was his. He earned it. But instead he viewed it as charity.
Dad worked for weeks painting that church, maybe even longer. I remember the paint cans and brushes he used lingering in our house for years. I never understood as a little kid why we had so many paint cans. I mean, I was young enough that my dad's bullshit explanation, "They're for painting," still made sense to me. But painting what? We didn't paint in our house until several years later, when all the old paint cans were long gone.
That was why my dad avoided going to church services at the church up the hill. Because he felt ashamed that he'd been in need. Because even though he bent his back and put in honest workdays for weeks he felt that the pastor took pity on him as a charity case. And possibly because he worried that other members of the parish would now view him as less than them, not a member of the parish in equal spiritual standing but merely the building's janitor.
The financial debt he incurred on those credit cards in 1976 took 40 years to pay off. The spiritual debt he incurred, he never paid off.
