Arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, Thursday afternoon, I was met by Annette, a buoyant grandmother easily recognizable by her bright blue scarf bearing the image of the patroness of the Catholic diocese: Our Lady of South Carolina, Our Lady of Joyful Hope.
On the way to the first stop of my Carolinas mini-tour, Pauline Books and Media on downtown King Street, Annette, a volunteer for the diocesan Respect Life office, told me that Planned Parenthood is planning an abortion megamill in Charleston along the lines of its mammoth center in Aurora and the one it is currently building in Denver. They are holding Tupperware-style neighborhood parties to raise funds for the mill, she said.
At the shop, receiving a warm welcome from its proprietors, Daughters of St. Paul, I had a relaxed and very happy time signing books for patrons drifting in and out over the next two hours—including Dawn Patrol readers John, aka JCB3, and MileHiMama—and meeting a couple of Steubenville students who had dropped in for the weekly "SpiritualiTEA." (The tea, held in a beautiful prayer garden tucked away behind the shop, usually draws about thirty to forty students, I was told, but the locals were on spring break.)
I also briefly met Father Stanley Smolenski of the Our Lady of Joyful Hope shrine, who happened to be in the shop when I arrived, but unfortunately I didn’t learn about his remarkable life and ministry until after he left. Had I known more about the meaning of the shrine he initiated (about which you can learn from its Web site, including a slide show) and his own work (which includes, I was later told, being the diocesan exorcist), I would have made an effort to engage him in conversation.
Afterwards, the co-sponsor of my Charleston appearances, diocesan Respect Life director Kathy Schmugge, took me to dinner with her and several others, including the other sponsor, Ben Daniel of the Society of Our Lady of Joyful Hope, and the head of the local Legion of Mary Curia, to dinner at local tourist haven Hyman's Seafood, where I was delighted to find fried okra on the menu.
The Southern hospitality continued at my talk at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, where the crowd was wonderfully attentive and bought up all the available copies of my book. Whenever I speak, I feel it was worth it if one member of the audience seems to be particularly touched by my talk. This time, I was abundantly rewarded with two such reactions, one from a man and the other from a woman, in addition to the many others who thanked me and chatted warmly with me at the book table for about 45 minutes after the lecture and Q&A. All in all, it was a beautiful experience; I could not have been made to feel more welcome or more appreciated.
One of the attendees, Ryckie, offered me possibly the greatest unexpected perk I have received since I began giving talks—a guided tour of Charleston. I gladly accepted and rode around the city with her and a friend of hers the next morning, after spending the night at the home of parishioners from the Church of the Holy Communion, the Anglican church which would be hosting my next set of talks over the weekend. It was the real deal—Ryckie had been a licensed city tour guide before retiring a few years back. As a first-time visitor, I loved getting to see some of city's historic buildings (not to mention getting a taste of melt-in-your mouth fresh pralines at a sweetshop.)
Ryckie dropped me off at Holy Communion, an elegant church completed during Reconstruction, before the noontime Stations of the Cross. I had not experienced much Anglican liturgy and was looking forward to learning more about it on this trip, especially since Holy Communion's pastor, Father Dow Sanderson, had briefed me about the congregation's high level of orthodoxy. Although Holy Communion is part of the local Episcopal diocese, it has a level of fidelity to traditional Anglo-Catholic teachings on a level with (and, in at least one case, surpassing) the breakaway parishes in the Washington area where I live. The simplest way to put it is that they claim to accept pretty much everything that Roman Catholicism teaches—with the notable exception of the celibate priesthood (two of Holy Communion's three priests are married)—and their liturgy is similarly faithful. For example, their Mass is essentially an English-language version of the Tridentine rite.
So, the liturgy of the Stations was "the same but different," as the saying goes—giving me a sort of "Looking-glass world" feeling that was to remain with me for the rest of the weekend. Before then, my only experience of the Catholic/Anglican divide had been on the Catholic side—beginning when, as an unchurched Protestant and the only non-Roman on the 2004 American Chesterton Society tour of England, I heard my fellow tourgoers say with noticeable bitterness practically every time our bus passed an old church, "That used to be ours."
Which is to say, although I immensely enjoyed the company of Holy Communion's priests, deacons, and the nearly 100 other parishioners during my weekend as guest speaker of their Lenten Retreat in the North Carolina mountains, I was not prepared for the feeling of being unable to fully participate in their worship. It was not at all the same as the times since my entrance into the Catholic Church when I have attended services at other Protestant churches or even the Falls Church, a breakaway Anglican parish in Virginia. It was like looking over at the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. I felt the twin pangs of being unable to receive Holy Communion with the parishioners and at the same time empathizing with their tangible sense of separation from what they call the Roman church.
A lot happened during that weekend, too much for me to go into here. In many ways, it was a Lenten experience in the sense of being purgative—which I hasten to add was due to what was going on with me personally, as the parishioners and their clergy went out of their way to make me feel welcome and appreciated.
One experience I can share with you came to me during the Low Mass on Saturday afternoon. I made a Spiritual Communion as the parishioners went up to receive, offering it up for everyone there and in hope of reunion. (When I say I made a Spiritual Communion, I mean that I united my heart with the Eucharist in all the tabernacles of the world, and with the presence of Christ in the church where I was at that moment, as He was very much present in the parishioners' love for Him.)
As I made the Spiritual Communion, feeling that sense of barrenness that I felt on an occasion when, for lack of a state of grace, I was unable to receive at a Catholic Mass, a strange thought occurred to me that is hard to describe.
I know that wherever the Real Presence is, there is Jesus. And I know that Jesus' Presence cannot be divided up; it is not minimized, however small the Host, nor is it any less depending on how many people are present at Mass or how many people comprise the body of the entire Catholic Church.
Yet, in feeling that the Eucharist in the room was lacking—for, the Mass not being celebrated by a Catholic priest, it was not consecrated in such a way that I could receive—I wondered what this lack said for the Holy Communion that I receive at my own parish. Specifically, I had the feeling that the Communion I received in the Church was, in some way, itself lacking—even though I knew on an intellectual level that, Jesus always being Jesus, this could not possibly be so.
The closest I can describe the feeling was that it made me wonder what Communion in my own church would be like if the entire Body of Christ was one. I realized for the first time that it is not only the Anglican Church—and, by extension, the entire body of Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy—which is missing something because of the separation. The Catholic Church is missing something too—to put it terribly mildly.
I had a similar feeling later that night after Compline and Benediction. Upon leaving the church, I found myself crying to the parishioners outside, telling them that the experience produced for me the thought that Mary was weeping like Rachel for her separated children.
By that point, my tears had been flowing quite freely for most of the day. They had started after lunch, following my morning talk and Q&A.
The talk had gone very well, along the lines of my Charleston one—and indeed, it was the same talk, Father Sanderson having encouraged me to make all the references to the Catechism and other Catholic writings that I would if I were speaking to my fellow Romans.
I had made the mistake, however, of failing to ask Father Sanderson or another parishioner to pray with me before my lecture—a request I normally make as a rule before each appearance, because the way I make myself so emotionally open puts me in need of spiritual protection. On this day, I was under particular stress, not only because of the Berlin Wall feeling that made the whole weekend so intense, but also because of something I haven't yet revealed to blog readers: I recently learned that I will indeed need a second operation to remove the rest of my thyroid, to be certain that my cancer will not reoccur. I think I was also still recovering from the "Today" show experience, which, although successful (and certainly pleasant, in terms of the way the program's staff treated me), put me through an emotional and spiritual wringer of sorts.
So, even though my talk was very well-received, I stumbled during the Q&A, when a question prompted me to raise an issue about which I am extremely sensitive. In discussing this issue, I shared a story about an action someone I knew had taken that was contrary to Church teachings. The residual resentment that I felt about what this person had done came out as I described it, and I sounded judgmental, not loving at all.
Afterwards, I had a bad feeling that I had marred an otherwise good appearance by venting. The feeling was confirmed when Father Sanderson approached me at the end of lunch and told me in the calmest, most sensitive tones that three attendees of the talk had taken part in an action like the one I had described that had offended me so.
The priest took pains to say that "99.9 percent" of the attendees saw nothing wrong with what I had said, and he even added that my condemnation of the action was theologically correct—a kindness that, while well intended, only made me feel worse, as I remembered to myself Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen's advice: "Win an argument, lose a convert." I felt that, however right I had been, I had approached that particular subject in a self-righteous way when the only proper way to approach it was from a standpoint of mercy and forgiveness.
Walking back to the building where my talk had taken place—and where I was to continue answering questions for another hour—I asked another priest, Father Patrick Allen, if he thought it would be out of line for me to apologize to those assembled. He told me he thought it would be fine. Like Father Sanderson, he was very sensitive to my feelings and did not judge me in any way—which was a good thing, as I was already on the brink of tears.
I finally started crying in the foyer outside the lecture hall, as I shared my feeling of guilt with a youth minister who had befriended me on Facebook during the weeks before my talk. When I cry in front of people, I don't sob—not unless I'm trying to cry and speak at the same time. The tears just start flowing and it seems like they will never stop. I am actually quite the crybaby; that's why I felt St. Maximilian worked a literal miracle for me at the moment of my New York Post firing when, having asked him in advance to keep me from shedding tears in front of the editors, I managed to remain dry-eyed throughout the ordeal.
The youth minister did his best to reassure me, as Father Sanderson had, that my talk had been overall very well received. Again, the kindness only made me feel worse and I just stared at him, mumbling thanks, with my face turned away from the rest of the attendees so that no one else could see the Niagara Falls.
Understandably disturbed by the display, he said to me plaintively, in the sweetest way, "But don't you feel accepted here? Don't you feel that we loved you?"
"Yes," I said, attempting a smile while being even more incapable of stopping the flow. "I do."
Did I mention that I have recently decided I could totally marry an Anglican? If he agreed to raise our kids Catholic, of course. (Anyone from Holy Communion surely would.)
So, I got back up to the podium and, after accepting an unexpected gift from Father Sanderson—a Book of Common Prayer—proceeded to give a mea culpa.
The audience was uniformly supportive—as Father Sanderson and the youth minister had said, they hadn't really noticed that I had said anything wrong. I started to feel better and apologized for crying.
"It's a good thing I didn't wear mascara today," I noted to the parishioners as my tears finally began to let up. "I actually thought of wearing," I added truthfully, "but after riding up with Father Dan, it seemed futile, because I realized I could never have eyelashes as beautiful as his."
At that, the crowd roared. Not knowing Holy Communion's Father Dan Clarke, you will have to trust me that he is a manly man who is known in the parish for being proud of his well-vested appearance in a self-parodying Jack Benny sort of way. A parishioner told me afterward that, when he donned the traditional rose vestments on Laetare Sunday, the line making the rounds, which he found as funny as anyone, was, "Father Dan—pretty in pink."
Many thanks to everyone named above, and to everyone else in the Charleston Diocese and at Holy Communion, all of whom truly did make me feel loved.
