My father wanted to be a priest.  Even more than that, though, he wanted to live the life of a monk.  I can understand this affinity because it is something that I recently realized that we share, even though he died five years ago.  I find this hard to reconcile, though, because, truly, my church life as an adolescent was for the most part a joke.  No, really.  I mean it.  It was a very funny thing.

I sit now in church sometimes, wondering if I could ever get my two year old to sit with me even for five minutes before she decides to use the pews as a running track.  Yet, I remember specifically sitting with my parents at a very young age.  I wonder what kind of ruckus I must have raised with parents that were deaf.  To this day, I think that many of the fellow parishioners must have stared deeply at my parents, perhaps even trying to whisper to them to shut my loud mouth up.  I imagine many people thought that my mom and dad must’ve been rude for totally ignoring the people around them while I wailed in the room with those beautiful acoustics.  I feel like I should be embarrassed about this even now.  The annoyance, or even pain, I inflicted on those people had to have shooed many of them away to different parishes or, perhaps, even different denominations!

Although screaming bloody murder is grounds for childhood folly, parental liturgical interruption is even more embarrassing.  I didn’t realize until a much later age that our presence at a normal Catholic church (meaning not one of the churches for the Deaf) is an all around pretty disruptive ordeal.  My dad was the chief instigator of this, though.  Here we have the man would be monk and, because he deprived himself of that most important liturgical factor, communication, my dad would just read the church bulletin throughout the forty-five minute service (thirty-five if you left after Eucharist, which we often did to my absolute joy).  Do you know what kind of paper those bulletins were printed on?  Well, I don’t, but I do know that they crinkle, crackle, and pop if you even think about turning a page.  Why this paper was used in the first place, I will never understand.  It was like giving a two year old a flute in the middle of mass.  So, here we would be, sitting in our pew about a third of the way to the altar.  I’d be bored and restless.  My mom would zone away, probably wondering exactly what time she would be getting up Sunday morning (yes, we would ONLY attend the 4:30pm mass on Saturdays.  Why?  I still don’t know.) to make her Sunday mega-feast which was usually comprised of either breaded chicken, ribs, or city chicken (Don’t know what that is?  It’s a Polish-American thing.  Google it.).  Then there was my dad.  He would read every word on every page, including the classifieds and ads.  Each turn of the page would echo like a loud, roaring fire throughout the entire church.  I can still remember how it sounded like something frying in a gigantic frying pan.  Then, the eyes would turn our way.  I looked sheepishly around, not even really noticing anything was even wrong.  Doesn’t everyone do this?  This was not all, though.

Inevitably, my father would sneeze at least once during a service.  This may sound inane enough for your average hearing person believing that all he had to do was muffle the sneeze with the additional help of a handkerchief.  This, for my dad, was certainly not the case.  My dad’s sneezes were rather legendary.  They were more like seismic belches as opposed to nasal cavity cleaners.  When my dad would start the air intake, the air around us would actually lose its oxygen content.  It was as if a vacuum was being created as all the available air was being sucked into his expanding lungs.  In order to not make a commotion (as if my dad wasn’t about to) I would just cringe and curl into a slight ball as if I’d heard “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” and he would unleash.  Unleash he would.  An explosion of such thunderous, bass-heavy proportions would ring out through the church and bounce back again and again and again.  The echo was the amazing part.  On one Saturday afternoon, I remember this very scene being played out and an older woman in front of us was so shaken by the eruption that she screamed out loud.  Behold the power of my father’s sneezes!

All these seemingly hilarious scenes lead me to ask something of some gravity: Why would a deaf man, so devoted to the Catholic church, optionally attend a hearing church instead of a deaf church?  Why deny yourself that vital line of communication in which you could learn new things and experience new ideas?  Why isolate yourself so?

I’d asked my father this many times and all I ever got was the easy answer: Deaf people are gossipy.  Fine, sure, so they’re gossipy at church.  Who isn’t, right?  I don’t think that was the root of his problem with this.  I think that his answer was much more complex and deep than just that.  I also think that what he thought is very much in common with what I think about “new churches.” I rail often against the over-simplification of not only the Bible and the story of Jesus, but the methods of worship taken in offering congregants time to contemplate or meditate.  In fact, for the most part, churches seem to be moving far away from meditation and more into pop culture and insta-save mentalities.  Perhaps my father looked at St. John’s Deaf Center that way.  Maybe it wasn’t the place he wished he could worship in.  Perhaps it was too new and modern and maybe even hip.  Maybe he couldn’t find a home to feel comfortable in spiritually.  Sadly, though, I’ll never know.

All this does shed light on my continuously aging self, though.  There is so much of my dad that I see in myself now that it sometimes scares me.  It scares me because part of it is just because that’s the way that I am and some part of it is because I’m trying to live through his spirit.  He was old fashioned, and, sometimes now, I am too.  Maybe I’m not as removed from my dad as I thought I was.

—–