By Teev Handal
There are few things more powerful than being raised both Southern and Catholic. It amounts to a boyhood steeped in intimacy and ritual. It results in a lifetime of Gothic views and spirits.
Not everyone is Catholic. So it may be difficult to see how being Catholic reinforces being Southern and vice versa. From baptism, Catholicism is a road of ritual, a path through shadows ending in the light. Baptism is not the simple daubing of blessed oil in the symbol of the cross on a child’s forehead, or the pouring of water through the infant’s fine hair. The source of water must be flowing, it cannot be still. One does not simply receive communion, they must go through appropriate training and instruction by both laity and the ordained. They must have made their first confession to God through a priest. They must take to heart and soul the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the holiest of flesh and blood.
Life is marked and recorded by these moments of sacrament.
Each sacrament cataloged on your baptismal certificate held at the church of your baptism, held where you were born in Christ.
We are fed the mysteries of the saints of our Church throughout the millennia.
St. Francis of Assisi, his life a roadmap to sainthood and forever naming him as patron saint of animals and the environment. St. Erasmus is the patron saint of sailors simply because he was martyred by having his entrails wound upon a capstan. St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. Lost causes – is there anything better to have a patron saint of, anything more Gothic, anything more truly Southern?
Being raised Southern was not as well documented as being raised Catholic. But by being born in the South there is an immediate tie to the land, to the earth by an umbilical cord forever unsevered. Life blood no longer coming from your mother, but from the red clay beneath your feet.
It is a link that is spiritual, but not pagan, with the sense that there is no smell like that of pine sap and the rotted leaves of a forest floor, or of salt and death in the scent of the pluff mud that fills the coastal marshes. It is seeing winter not as domineering, but as flirtatious with the springtime as her skirts flare out in flaunting enticing unequal wisps of hot and cold. It is embracing the humidity which embraces us, telling us that we are both loved and possessed.
Instead of saints, we have our ghosts. Lost family, neighbors, even the occasional stranger that is still tied to us rather than making the step into what is next. Beyond these ephemeral qualities, there are rituals to be learned, to be passed down from father to son and mother to daughter.
Raised to be a gentleman, I opened doors for girls, said yes ma’am and no ma’am no matter what age I was speaking to. I was raised to tend my own garden of a soul alone and in quiet no matter how rocky the soil or how blistered and blooded my hands got.
To be a man is to bear up, to take the load and carry it unblinking.
Girls are raised to be fierce and to be the foundation of the family and the keeper of our dead. They are raised to smile sadly and with complete empathy as they pierce you unnoticed. The presence of blood (actual or metaphorical) the first and most lasting impression that the argument is lost, and you have just been killed with kindness.
My life has been and will always be entangled in the mysteries of my land and my faith. There are shadows in both but no place to hide. Whether it is the red of the clay or the red of Christ’s blood, whether it is the humid kiss of summer or the oily smearing of ashes on my forehead, my life will always be guided by the symbols of my birth and baptism.
My life will always lie on this beautiful and flawed foundation because I know nothing else.
Bless m’heart.
