Saint Somebody Central Catholic

PRELUDE

Wild Geese are unpredictable, loud and harsh, and tend to bite people who try to capture them. Celtic Christians thus represented the Holy Spirit not as a dove but a Wild Goose. Like many people God refuses to leave alone, the Wild Goose has been honking at me and harassing me for years now. My life has been a Wild Goose chase since that summer at the turn of the century when I took a job teaching at a Catholic high school in Boston. It hasn’t been a Wild Goose chase because I was chasing a wild goose, but because The Wild Goose has been chasing me. Not that I’m complaining, but it can seem at times as if the Wild Goose is harassing me down a long road to nowhere. Only when it lets me rest and I get to look back does the pilgrimage make any sense at all. My Wild Goose Chase began at St. Somebody Central Catholic High School in the summer of 2000. Here’s the story as best as I can remember it.

I

ORDINARY TIME

The name of the liturgical season comes from the Latin ordino: to set in order, regulate, arrange, appoint, or govern. Ordinary Time marks the passing of a measured fragment in the life of the church, the people of God. It is not ordinary in the English definition of the word: plain, simple, and unadorned. Examine any passage of time in your life or in the life of the world and you will find it filled with the extraordinary and the divine. If you look, you will see the presence of God in the people, the places, and the events of everyday life. Every moment is a miracle. Every day is sacred. There is darkness, but there is also joy and love. Ordinary Time is extravagant, complex, and decorative. We mark its passing because it is so special. We measure it because it is to be savored, all of it savored—the good and the bad, the joy and the sorrow, the holy and the not-so-holy. Ordinary Time says, Take note, for this moment is full of grace and will never come again. Ordinary Time says, You are God’s beloved child and you are extraordinary. Ordinary Time says, I will be with you always, even unto the end of the world, but I make no guarantees the going will always be easy.

The liturgical color of Ordinary Time is green, the color of those who are new and inexperienced. Just about right for beginning a new job.

Chapter 01

Teachers First Day

Are you a virgin? Theo asks me.

What? Is your brain a virgin? He just said he got a wife and kids, Yahira says to Theo.

"Maybe his wife don’t like to do it and the kids are adopted," suggests Raul.

I answered before it started to run away from me.

"No, I’m not a virgin. As Yahira pointed out, I have a wife and kids. My children’s names are Rafael and Gabriella. They are three and five, respectively, and they are not adopted. My wife’s name is Marie and whether she likes doing it is more sharing than is required or even acceptable from a teacher to students, so let’s stop there, OK? I picked up pictures of Marie, Gabby, and Rafe off my desk and sent them around the class. Here are their pictures."

Mista, your wife is pretty!

And your kids are cute.

Thanks. I think so, too, I answered as more questions were thrown at me.

Does your wife color her hair?

Can I baby-sit for you?

It felt like being pelted with jelly beans. I couldn’t even keep up with who was speaking or which face went with which name and which face and name with each question. This was not the first time I had taught high school. I taught for a year in the Archdiocese of Chicago and then a year in the Diocese of Fall River, but in each situation I spent the first class giving a lecture on my syllabus. This year, I took the advice of Annette Jean, the Haitian-born chair of the theology department here at St. Somebody’s, and I was trying to get to know the students first and teach second. I think it was Anita who said Marie is pretty and Yahira who said Rafe and Gabby are cute. I was lost by the time one of the girls asked about Marie coloring her hair. I was looking over Yahira’s shoulder when the baby-sitting offer came at me from a girl whose name I couldn’t remember from homeroom. Carmen, I think.

I wasn’t afraid of the questions or the kids like I would be of a swarm of bees. I did, however, feel like I was caught in a swarm of mayflies or mosquitoes and just wanted to get myself into a breeze. Yahira shoved the picture of my children back at the girl behind her.

Carmen, look how cute.

I jumped back in. Aren’t they? Now that they’re both out of diapers. I am definitely going to like the out-of-diapers stage better. I pinched my nose. I hated changing diapers.

The girls laughed.

How old are you?

I held up my hand. Not until I get your name and one thing about you, I said.

My name is Janet. I got sickle-cell. I’m gonna be absent a lot. Oh yeah, and I’m Trini, baby!

Trini?

Trin-ee-dad and Toe-bay-go, honey. So how old?

I’m thirty-three. And don’t call me honey, my wife will get jealous.

Wow! I thought you was younger, like twenty-one or somethin’.

You’s so freakin’ stupid. He can’t be like twenty-one or he’d still be in college or somethin’.

Easy, Yahira. Thanks, Janet. Next?

I’m Vanessa and I’m Trini, too.

Not good enough. Trini is taken. You must tell us something about yourself that has not yet been used by another person. So…

I play pan.

The look that passed over my face told her that I had eight years of post- secondary education and I had absolutely no clue what pan is because she said, You know, steel drums.

Vanessa proceeded to snatch a pen from the guy next to her and tap out a complex rhythm on her desk. Even though her performance lacked pitch, it was impressive. A hand went up across the room.

Yes?

My name is Royale. I like to read. I want to ax you if you like to read.

Good for you, Royale. I like to read, too. What kinds of books do you like to read?

She likes to read fairy tales, said a male voice from the back of the room.

Yeah, replied another male voice, lost in the back corner. You know, like Cinderella.

This brought high-fives and laughs from all the guys and most of the girls.

I locked in on Royale. Never mind them. What kinds of books do you like to read?

I especially like books by African-American writers. Have you read books by African-American writers?

Yes, I have. I’ve read Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. Have you read those people?

"No, but I heard of that Maya person. I like Omar Tyree books. An’ Miss Quinn, she give me a book called Clover that I liked."

Hints galore. Ms. Quinn is the special education tutor. I’d never heard of Omar Tyree, but I was pretty sure Clover was for younger readers.

Ladies? I looked down at two small shy girls in the front row, nodding my head and motioning for them to speak, inviting them in as best I could.

The Asian girls in the front row smiled and looked down at their desks. Carmen, who seemed to be Yahira’s best pal, walked up to the front of the room.

Mista, this is Vo and this is Hang, Carmen said, making the game show prize girl gesture first to her left at Vo and then to her right at Hang. They are Vietnamese, they are very nice, and they are very quiet. Vo and Hang smiled at me. Hang said she liked Vietnamese food, but also pizza and speaking English. She also said Vo is very shy, but likes to draw and her English isn’t as good as Hang’s. Vo didn’t say anything.

Nice to meet you both.

Running out of time, I thought I’d better press the guys sitting stoically in the back.

Guys, we haven’t heard from any of you. How about it?

They already know us.

Maybe, but I don’t.

"That’s your problem."

True enough. Look, there are twenty of you and only one of me. If even two of you want to make my life in this room miserable, you will be able to do so just by outnumbering me. As far as I can tell, I have asked little from you: a name and any other piece of information you can share. Your favorite sport or favorite food will do. In return, I’m telling you a lot about myself. I am trusting you with my information.

I’m Korey. I like fine women.

And your question for me?

Ain’t got one.

Fine by me. Next?

No takers? Pause for effect. Yahira?

I’s already went.

"I know, hon. I just need a direction from you. Left or right. A la izquierda o a la derecha?" Points for me, maybe, until they find out my Spanish effectively ends at directions, numbers, colors, telling time, dates, and the present tense of the verb ser.

"A la derecha."

Great. Moving along to Korey’s right, brings us to you.

The incredibly large, Shaq-like boy-man in the oversized Fubu calf-length cargo pants and Michael Jordan’s UNC replica tank top stared at me. I stared back, looked away, then stared again. It felt like therapy and as the therapist I can’t talk first. But this was school and I had more than one head to get into in my fifty-minute hour.

Come on, man, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

I ain’t scared of nobody, ’specially not you.

Well, then?

More silence. Finally Yahira got up and stomped to the back of the room. She slapped the Shaq boy on the shoulder.

He’s nice. Tell him your name, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah tried to shoo her away.

So your name is Jeremiah? The scene from Roots of the overseer trying to make Levar Burton say Toby instead of Kunta Kinte shot through my brain. This thought in itself troubled my white liberal conscience. Yahira slapped at Jeremiah again.

Chill, he snapped at Yahira. He turned to face me at the front of the room. Yeah, I’m Jeremiah. I like basketball.

You like to play ball? asked the guy sitting next to him. A break in the ice. I dove in. The water was still cold, but I wasn’t about to let on it felt so.

Like to play? Yes. Any good? Well, I can shoot from about fifteen feet in, but I’m slow and have a vertical leap of about zero inches. I am better at tennis and I played football and tennis when I was in high school.

Being seen as an athlete without a uniform was better than being seen as a priest without a collar and the back row started to loosen up.

I’m James. I play football. This year I’m going to be quarterback. What position did you play?

I played right guard.

My name is Skinny and I like hip-hop. I rap.

Yahira jumped in again. What kind of music you like, Mr. C? You like rap?

"Some, not much. I used to listen to the Beastie Boys and Run DMC. Now that’s old school. I like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill a lot. My favorites are Bruce Springsteen, U2, and Bob Marley and the Wailers."

My name is Thomas. I hate religion and I hate you.

Well, since I am your religion teacher, your hatred of religion may be difficult from a purely practical viewpoint. You’ve only known me for twenty minutes and don’t know me well enough to hate me yet. In a few weeks, you can hate me.

And so it went. Fifty minutes at a time, five times that day—day one in a new school. They learned about me—more than they needed, but less than they wanted to know—and you should get at least what they got. I was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to a very much 100 percent Azorean Portuguese mother and an Irish/English alcoholic father. I graduated from New Bedford High School and Worcester State College (also in Massachusetts) and then spent two years in the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe where I met my Franco-American wife Marie. I then entered Harvard Divinity School and graduated with a Master of Divinity degree. Not knowing what I wanted to do, I applied for the Doctor of Theology program at the University of Chicago and to my surprise, got accepted. I dropped out, over Marie’s vehement objections, because I was tired of academic theology. It is probably closer to the truth to say that the more theology I learned the more of an atheist I was becoming. I felt I needed a break to get back in touch with all the values and ideals that sent me to study theology in the first place—God is love, a keen sense of and yearning for justice, and the need for peace in the self and in the world. I worked at a Catholic high school in Chicago for a year and then as a chaplain intern for a year at St. Lucy’s Hospital in Worcester, where Marie had begun to put her nursing degree to good use. Then I started teaching back home in New Bedford at Bishop Resendes High School. I got fired when I was caught being open-minded and ended up in Boston at St. Somebody just before I was ready to give up on teaching and the Catholic Church entirely.

I like sports. I play guitar. Marie and I have a son and a daughter, and we just bought a house in Bethelle, a small city about 30 miles west of Boston on the Pike. I also have absolutely no idea how I got from my own days in high school as a football-playing, punk-rocking, beer-drinking, drug-taking, and depressed angry young man to teaching religion in a Catholic high school. The short answer is God, but the details… Christ.

Chapter 02

Mass Confusion

The church building is huge—a monstrous, neo-Gothic, nineteenth century creation of the Boston Irish. St. Somebody’s is tall, majestic, arrayed in gold and colored glass, and dedicated to a saint I have never heard of before or since, Lorcan Ua Tuathail. It is utterly and completely lifeless.

When I interviewed for the job, I learned that St. Lorcan’s name was Larry O’Toole. I was never much into the cult of the saints. Many years before I arrived, a chunk of granite over the door with Larry’s name fell off and has never been replaced. All that’s left are the letters T-H-A-I-L. There is a signpost naming the church St. Lorcan’s, but there is nothing at the school that connects to the church and rectory and extends down the block. A religious order once ran both the church and the school, but when the Archdiocese of Boston wanted the church building for use as the cathedral in the middle of the nineteenth century, the religious order sold the church and the rectory, but not the school. In the 1920s, the Archdiocese built a new cathedral closer to downtown, and the parish of St. Lorcan with its church and school were left behind in a left-behind section of the city. Today just about everyone refers to both the church and the school as St. Somebody’s.

The day of the school’s convocation liturgy, I was praying once again in a front pew of a place that I want to claim precludes such activity in me. I was, in fact, sitting in the same spot where I spent most of an entire afternoon (all right, all right, a couple of hours) two weeks earlier, contemplating my future, or rather God’s future, which happened to feature me in this particular instance. I don’t believe God is a cosmic puppet master, at the controls of a vast computer game of the universe, and yet I sometimes find myself in the most implausible of circumstances.

Two weeks before school started, I sat in this pew and prayed. I had just come from an interview with David Martin, the headmaster of St. Somebody Central Catholic High School, and Sister Eunice Brideau, the dean of students. It was the most bizarre job interview. Neither of them seemed to want to know much about me. Rather, they seemed overeager to sell the position at St. Somebody. I felt like a sucker at a used-car lot. What was so bad about the place that they seemed to be begging me to take the job? Who was interviewing whom?

I attempted to show them my portfolio. I attempted to demonstrate how I use juggling in class. I attempted to show them examples of my work using web design and PowerPoint slide shows as methods of both presentation and assessment. After all, allowing students to turn in reports as PowerPoint presentations instead of written essays and teaching my students to juggle were some of the things that got me axed from my last position. I wanted to be sure, before the discussion went very far, that they were going to let me be, well, myself. I was ready to give up on the teaching thing. What the hell, I had tried it, but the Church did not seem to want me. The Church didn’t want me as a priest because I was married and they didn’t want me in a Catholic school because I taught my students to juggle. Kick the dust off your shoes and move on. Or so I thought. Every job I applied for that summer was a bust. Either the place didn’t want me or I knew I would be miserable working there. All of a sudden it was the end of August and the last paycheck from my previous school had just arrived in the mail. My wife, my kids, and my mortgage lender were not going to stand for me being unemployed come the first of September. My mother called me and said some high school in Boston named Saint….Saint…Saint… Oh, hell, John, Saint Somebody or other was looking for a religion teacher. She saw the ad in the Standard Times and figured it couldn’t hurt me to apply, seeing as I hadn’t found anything else yet. I couldn’t fault her logic, so I called David Martin. He set up an interview for the next morning.

Look, Dave told me, I read your résumé and called the previous schools you worked for.

And you still want to talk to me? I said.

No, look, he replied, I don’t want to talk much. I just want you to take the job. Look, we don’t get people with your academic background applying to St. Somebody very often.

More like never, added Sister Eunice.

Right. Look, never, repeated Dave. So we really want you to consider teaching at St. Somebody. I know it’s not much, but we can start you at 37k with your education and your experience. I didn’t hear some of what he said next because 37k was a fifteen grand raise over my last teaching salary and the blood rushing through my ears as I prepared to lapse into shock was drowning out his voice.

Look, Dave pleaded. Dave Martin says Look a lot. It’s annoying, but you get used to it. I don’t know why God sent you to us, but God sent you to us. St. Somebody needs you. Take the job. Please.

I told him I needed to think about it. He told me he could give me a couple of days, but he had to have someone by the start of school. I told him a couple of hours would be fine. I don’t know why God always plays this damn Nineveh game with me. I didn’t want to run away from a gift that God was trying to drop in my lap, but it seemed too easy, too convenient. I needed a moment to think. I wanted to drive around and blast the rock’n’roll evangelist Bruce Springsteen on the car stereo and let the situation settle into my soul. I didn’t have time for that, though. I had parked at Alewife out on the end of the Red Line and it would take me forty-five minutes just to get back to the car. I strolled out of the school and walked down the street to the church. Later, I would learn of a basement passageway that led from the school to the church hall. The kids called this the Cave. It was the only connection between the church buildings and the school that hadn’t been sealed off. I walked down the long corridors of the school, my feet echoing on floorboards so old they rose and fell like small wooden waves. I emerged onto the street and shaded my eyes against the August sun. An ancient, rusting iron fence ran along the sidewalk separating the sacred buildings from the secular city street. I climbed the monstrous steps and entered the rear of the nave. I walked to the front pew, sat down, and prayed. The way I remember it, it went something like this:

Listen up, Big Guy. I was certain this kind of gig was over for me, but if this is what I should do, I will do it. I need a job, they seem to want me, and it seems to me that YOU want me to do this. I’m just gonna sit and listen for a while. If you got anything against this, let me know. And I sat for two hours. The gold angels blew silent trumpets high up on the corners of the transept. None of the statues came to life, the crucifix didn’t start bleeding, and no heavenly light illuminated me through the stained glass windows. I wasn’t really expecting a burning bush moment, but every once in a while, it’d be nice to have one, just to be sure of things. I walked back outside and called Marie on the cellphone. I told her about the school, the job offer, and the prayer. She told me she had three questions to ask me.

Do you have a wife and a family?

Yeah, I answered.

Do you have a mortgage?

Yes.

Are you currently employed?

No.

I swear you’re the dumbest smart man I’ve ever met.

I walked across the street and told Dave I’d take the job.

Super. Super. Look, that’s just super! Dave said, slapping me on the back and pumping my hand with his as if I’d just joined his frat and not his faculty.

Two weeks later, as I joined the students and staff for the opening Mass of the school year, the architecture was annoying me. The sanctuary is far removed from the first row of pews in the nave and up a flight of stairs. The altar space is a physical embodiment of the transcendent deity. For all its majesty, size, and grandeur, it strikes me as a museum, not a place for encountering a living God. Its enormity makes one feel small, insignificant, and less important than the divine beings that inhabit the sanctuary. We were all lost in the nave, spectators removed from a distant ritual that is supposed to bring us together. One thing I learned about my students in the first two days of school was that they needed community desperately. Most had none at home. For communion to lack community wasn’t just a spiritual loss for them, it was a psychological one as well.

I walked in with Annette Jean, the chair of the theology department, and we sat behind Royale. As we took our seats, Royale was politely, but firmly, asking the row of guys in front of her to be quiet and to please, Behave yourselves in chapel. They mocked her and called her Cinderella. They quieted down when we sat next to her and Royale smiled and folded her hands in her lap.

Mr. O’Grady was screaming at a group of senior girls, Sit down and shut up in God’s house! The girls looked at him with a mixture of horror and hatred and it became increasingly clear how this man had accumulated his aliases. I had been at St. Somebody’s a grand total of two days and I had learned the following names for the principal: Mrs. Ol’ Lady, Mr. O’Gravy, Mr. O’Greedy, Mr. Shady, Six Head (Way bigga than a forehead, Mr. C!), and my personal favorite—Frankenhead. Frankenhead fittingly described both his enormous square-shaped head and his reputation as a monster among both students and faculty.

The faculty room had been full of talk about what a horror this opening day Mass would be. Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Luther, and Mrs. Frogman droned on about how misbehaved the kids would be and how none of the brats knew how to conduct themselves in church. Mrs. Frogman vented raw heat about how she absolutely loathed having to patrol those aisles like a prison guard. This duty, of course, stopped her from watching the sacrifice of the Mass with sufficient piety. Do people really use the expression sufficient piety in casual conversation?

Sure enough, however, she was right. Corrections Officers Luther, Smith, and Froggie, along with Warden O’Grady, did not so much supervise as patrol the nave. This was not worship; this was lockdown. Not one wayward glance, wave to a friend, inappropriate smile, or unbent knee went unnoticed. When the school’s gospel choir began to sing, anyone who dared to move, sway, clap or sing along was reprimanded with God’s own speed.

Monsignor Scanlon’s directive before distributing communion was mesmerizing in its repulsiveness. Those of you who are confessed Catholics may come forward at this time to receive the sacred host, which is the body of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Non- Catholics are encouraged to remain kneeling and pray for the unity of all Christians, that we may all one day share in this sacred sacrifice.

I’ve heard this little speech in various forms, mostly at weddings, occasionally at a funeral, in dozens of Catholic churches. Aside from being bad theology (if not, sadly, incorrect in its orthodoxy), it is downright rude. I call it the uninvitation to communion. I wonder if Monsignor Scanlon would invite someone to dinner and then not serve them any food. You know those posters with the loaf of bread and the wine glass with the statement about Jesus of Nazareth inviting you to a dinner in his honor? I have never seen one that adds, but he will only let you eat with him if you are a confessed practicing Catholic in good standing in the eyes of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the local Opus Dei chapter, and your nearest conservative bishop. Monsignor, however, must own a copy of this version of the poster. The Monsignor was worrying about who’s having communion when we have students from families worrying about what they are having for dinner—or even if they are having dinner.

The good Monsignor would not have any trouble giving the host to any type of confessed serial killer, but a Baptist—God forbid! They tell me only forty-five percent of the students at St. Somebody are Catholic. Yet on the second day of classes, during the first time we gathered to worship, we started the year by excluding more than half of our students. This made absolutely no sense to me. The Baptists, AMEs, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Methodists, Four Square Gospels, Assembly of God-ers, and all the rest of them probably wouldn’t even think twice if I showed up at a service and received communion. But then again, they are not the One True Church.

The Body of Christ, droned Monsignor, as he placed the host in my hand.

Amen, I replied, trying to remember how I got up to the front of the church. I was going on to myself about inter-communion issues and had tuned out the entire proceeding. Walking back to my seat, I thought about what my friend Mona used to say about communion. I can believe that the bread is the body of Christ, but I have trouble believing those little wafer things are bread. Mona was a convert from Lutheranism (kind of like being traded from the team that lost the World Series to the team that won) and just finishing her Th.D. at the University of Chicago.

Then I saw Yahira. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. O’Grady was screaming over the choir and into her face, If you won’t kneel, then get up and walk! Walk right across the street and into my office!

Yahira started yelling right back at him.

I ain’t walkin’ nowhere. I ain’t invited to have no communion so I ain’t gonna kneel like I was.

You will kneel at communion and you will walk when I say so. Across the street! Now! Or so help me God I’ll call your father and have him come down here and carry you over to my office.

Yahira wavered. She was obviously weighing every pro and con of holding her position. O’Grady hovered, stammering, Well, Señorita? Well, Señorita? Slowly, she rose. Eyeballing O’Grady all the way to her feet, one deliberate step at a time she strode toward the exit. Martin Luther’s theses on the door may have been a more demonstrative dissent, but Yahira’s was just as courageous. And more mysterious. I swear she had said that her dad was dead. What was her crime? Heresy or hubris? All she did was point out the obvious inconsistency in what she was being required to do.

Chapter 03

The Aftermass

So, what did you all think of Mass?

Silence. Eyes cast down. Some were smiling; others buried their faces in folded arms upon their desks. The implication being that if we’re going to have to go to church and then talk about it, then we’re going to catch some Z’s.

I waited. Nothing. I had to go for it.

I thought it sucked.

I thought it was absolutely, completely horrible.

Silence. Now it was due to shock. The religion teacher was dissin’ church. This woke people up.

Yeah, man, said Antawan. Dat was wack!

Wack?

Yeah, you know, it…uh… it sucked, man.

It stunk? I offered.

Yeah, whatever.

Not whatever, Antawan. It stunk. I agree. Now we have a choice. We let it go or we change it.

Change what? Antawan hit back, They ain’t gonna let you change nothin’. And even if they let you, how you gonna change it?

I shelved my lesson plan for the day. The opening of school Mass was a crime. People should be arrested for bad liturgy. I needed to know straight off just how bad the kids thought it was. I needed to know if they were so used to such a poor experience of church that they had the ability to reach total blockout, a state where they are able to ignore what’s going on around them totally, even if what is going on is an abuse of the soul. If they noticed how bad it was, however, we had a chance—perhaps a tiny chance, perhaps a better than average chance—of changing the sad liturgical circumstances. Thankfully, we were in the middle of a mass Mass critique. There was enough disgust to work with. My major fear was apathy. This was not apathy. We were on the same page—the wack/sucked page.

Mr. C?

Yeah, Lydia? Lydia Cummings’s dad was a Pentecostal preacher with a church on Blue Hill Avenue. St. Somebody had a lot of students from the Pentecostal and Evangelical churches in Boston’s black neighborhoods. These churches didn’t have their own schools, at least at the high school level, and many parents thought it better to send the kids to the Catholics than to the Godless public schools.

Can I ax you a question?

Yes, Lydia, go ahead.

Do y’all Catholics believe in the Holy Ghost? asked Lydia.

Yes, we do.

Ya wouldn’t know it from that Mass thing y’all do.

No, you wouldn’t, Lydia. That’s my point.

Knowmsayin’? Mr. C, y’all wants us to sit there and watch the minister and not do nothin’. It’s so borin’. My dad says you all Catholics don’t let the Holy Ghost work on ya cuz’n y’all’re uptight and think religion is all about the Pope’s rules. At my daddy’s church people get into the Holy Ghost. I like it. Peoples singin’ an’ prayin’ an’ movin’ an’ swayin’. I hate that Mass thing. It’s like you tryin’ to pray in Hell. Mr. O’Grady always tellin’ me to sit down and be quiet when the choir’s singin’. I can’t go to choir practice after school on Thursdays so’s I can’t be in the choir, but then I try and sing wit’ ’em and O’Grady’s tellin’ me to shut up and sit down. I don’t get it.

Lydia, Mr. O’Grady wouldn’t recognize the Holy Spirit if it jumped up and bit him on the ass. This received general and sustained applause. Not only was the religion teacher dissin’ church and O’Grady, now he was using the word ass in class. Seriously, people, Mr. O’Grady has a common disease. He’s one of those people that think how you pray is more important than actually praying. It’s not entirely his fault. That’s the religion he was raised with and like many Catholics his age, he acts as if he doesn’t believe in the Holy Spirit because no one probably ever taught him about the Spirit. The religion he grew up with wasn’t about feeling the Spirit, it was about following the rules. Now rules can be good things, but following rules for the sake of following rules is stupid. Just the same, breaking rules just to break them is stupid. What we need to do is change the rules.

Like how you gonna do that, huh, Mr. C?

I’m not. I can’t. But you can.

How’s that?

Any of you guys rap?

Mr. C?

Lydia?

You can’t rap in church. My daddy says that rap is from the Devil. It’s all about hatin’ police, hatin’ women, an’ takin’ drugs and all.

Stop hatin’ on rap, Lydia.

I’ll hate on you, Leon.

No, Lydia, you won’t hate on anybody, I said. What we’re all gonna hate on is hate. Now back to the action. Can any of you guys rap?

You mean like Kirk Franklin gospel rhymes and dat shit?

A bit, but more like your own words for what’s happening in the scripture or in your own lives that teaches something positive.

But Mr. C, you can’t rap in church.

Why not, Lydia? You can’t sing about hating women and taking drugs and all that, but you can rap. You can use hip-hop style and beats to sing appropriate words. Come on, guys. I’ve seen some of you outside at lunch free-styling. Somebody give me a rap.

Nobody moved. They just stared at me. I was just some corny white guy fronting my hip-hop. I picked up a Bible and flipped to the Psalms.

If you have your Bible, open it up, I said to the congregation.

The Psalms begin on page 619 in your school Bibles.

Lydia and two or three other girls opened their Bibles. Skinny peeked over Lydia’s shoulder.

If you don’t know where to begin, just take any of these Psalms, pick out something where the message is simple and re-write it into your own words.

It started out low. Then it started to grow. It was Skinny. I was waiting on him, but didn’t want to single him out and put him on the spot, but he came through on his own. He just followed Psalm 1 and spoke it in the tongues of the street. Nice.

I’m straight, I’m chillin’ with the holy, not the wicked

I’m hangin’ on the block with saints wearin’ crowns,

Where we all know not to hang with the clowns

Who are dissin’ the mission of God’s holy word

Because the righteous will be saved while the wicked go down.

Nice, Skinny. Awesome! I raised my voice so that my praise would be heard above the laughter of homeboy row. That’s it! Will you do that at a Mass?

Yeah, I guess, but like O’Grady and Sister Eunice will let me.

I’ll take care of Sister Eunice and O’Grady. You just be ready.

The door creaked open. My worst fear when the door opens like this in my classroom is that some elderly Sister in the administration will wander in, and hear me say something like the word ass. As in, O’Grady wouldn’t recognize the Holy Spirit if it jumped up and bit him on the ass. But