Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

“Now I know that rose trees never grow in New York City…”

First stop on the road trip is New York City. The Paulist mother parish, St. Paul the Apostle, is located on 59^th Street and 9th Ave in a beautiful old church that dates back to the 1880’s, one block from Columbus Circle and Central Park. While we had to commute into the city from Oak Ridge> (no room at the inn) we spent two days getting to know all of the different ministries, including some very exciting art, communications, and even acting programs. It’s the kind of outside the box stuff I have always seen myself doing. And I’m in New York.

As mentioned before and for reasons I’m sure I will go into deeper at another time… well it’s not that I hate the culture of Christendom, but I don’t exactly do back flips over it either. I’m still asking myself why I’m Catholic in the first place; the others seem a lot more into it than me. And after two weeks of all Jesus, all of the time, I am starting to close down. Morning prayer, evening prayer, crucifixes as far as the eye can see -- I need air, both of an outdoor and a non-Catholic variety. So after lunch, I go for a walk in Central Park. Despite my current spiritual confusion, I am starting to feel at home amongst the priests and Paulists and what they do. Yet…

Ten months ago I had a great weekend in New York City with my old girlfriend. Granted, we spent the entire weekend being dragged along from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant by a friend of hers who was making a mad, mad attempt to eat every unique culinary offering New York has to offer within the span of 48 hours. In between eateries, we walked the long way through Central Park hand in hand. Yeah, I know, I know… there’s a lot with the church that I should be opening up to, the work this order does is a great fit… I’ll just say then when I used to think of New York I mostly thought of the Yankees, thin-crust pizza, and Sabrett hot dogs. That’s not really the case anymore.

“I thank the Lord there's people out there like you”

St. Paul’s the Apostle houses a lot of the retired Paulists. When I walked back inside to go to my next meeting, Frank, one of the retirees I’ve met asks… well, I forget what the exact question was, but something along the lines of “How is everything going?” but more specific. I answer “I don’t know.”

“Good answer,” Frank responds. With the amount of questions about my own personal theology running through my head for the past two weeks, it’s exactly what I needed to hear. Still, that stubborn part that doesn’t want to feel better at that moment says “GGrrrrrrr.”

Dinner that night is with the sisters who live on the third floor of the rectory. The Oblates of Jesus the Priest is an order of sisters from Mexico who pray for and serve priests. The cook dinner and do the laundry for the Paulists in the house, as well as say daily prayers. Rene, my fellow novice from Belize, looks right at home, which is great to see. I do speak a little Spanish, so I am taking the opportunity to practice, as is Rene and G. (Buster, who doesn’t speak Spanish at all, is smiling and nodding a lot. We should have tried to include him some more, but we couldn’t resist the opportunity to practice.) All of the sisters are really warm, and funny. Maria asks me how much Spanish I know, and then she says that I probably just know the dirty words. I definitely like this one. Turns out, she’s also the superior, which I wouldn’t have guessed because she wasn’t the oldest at the table. Maria’s also the one who, after finding out that I have two sisters, tells me that I now have six more.

At the end of the dinner, each of the six sisters tells their story; Maria goes first. She starts by saying that she simply wanted to spend her life praising God, serving and praising Jesus. And that on this earth, we at the table are Jesus for her. She’s looking right at me. As grateful as I was for running into Frank earlier in the day, I’m not now grinding my teeth. I have the feeling I’ll be leaning on that one moment for a long time to come.