Delayed Gratification
Maria's parents had been Roman Catholic. As had their parents. And their parents. Forever and ever amen. You get the picture.
But what mattered more was that Maria herself was a Catholic, and she would remain one. It was an indelible, irreplaceable, and in some ways, irreparable part of her identity.
Just as non-negotiable was Maria’s conviction that she was to be a priest. Someday and some way she was to be someone set aside to shape the word of Christ with her lips and to raise the wafer the Spirit touched and made His body. It was her calling to share the flesh of God fractured to re-create of the world.
Even now, thirty years later, with the deadening impact of middle age's full fury imposing itself upon her, Maria could remember the moment she received her call to the priesthood.
Although Texan, her family had been poor and Mexican by ancestry, and Maria’s church had been poor and Mexican. Pathetically so, Maria thought as she sat in her Audi as an adult, frozen in traffic, and wandering back into her memory.
Their congregation could only afford one large room in which to gather as a community. On Sunday morning the room was, of course, a house of worship arranged for Mass.
However, if you’d visited that very same space twelve hours earlier, you might have found yourself in a bare-bones parlor arranged for a lady's book club, or a simple medical clinic checking the blood pressure of homeless men, or a hall stinking of burnt coffee and people resisting addiction.
Yet, at some point, in a manner that was in its own way as wondrous as the consecration of the bread and cup during mass, the chairs would be moved and the banners hung. At some point Clark Kent would enter his telephone booth, rip off his shirt and tie, and Superman would emerge. The ugly room would be reborn a sanctuary for Christ's body, a space in which to worship, a beachhead in Heaven’s invasion of Earth.
And sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, before the magic of transformation occurred, their cheap all-purpose church hall would become a place for a child's birthday party. Streamers hanging from the altar. Balloons drooping from the walls on either side of the sculpted body of a dead Jesus.
This was the stage on which the memory of Maria's call to the priesthood played out.
Her friend Rosa, the birthday girl, had told Maria at school on Friday that the party would have a piñata. Rosa shared the news in a state of high anticipation. Maria received the news with distaste and anxiety.
Now Maria liked candy. Sure she did. She was a child, after all, and piñatas always ended in an orgy of candy. But it was the getting to that end-point which struck Maria, even at the age of ten, as off-kilter, brutal, and perverse.
To that point in Maria’s life all the piñatas she’d known were shaped like people. She remembered the first one she’d encountered. She couldn't forget it. She had been four.
Maria had recently fallen in love with the Disney version of Cinderella. She'd already planned her home-made Halloween costume around it and learned all the songs showcased in the movie. Due to her devotion to Disney’s Cinderella, Maria had even gone so far as to reassess her position on mice.
In the midst of her Cinderella madness, the four-year-old Maria had walked into a friend's backyard for a birthday party and seen the piñata – a papier-mâché Cinderella hanging from a tree as if lynched.
This was a horror-show vision, at least for Maria. It did not compute. She was supposed to bludgeon her hero, or at least her hero’s effigy, and this was supposed to be fun? Who does that kind of thing?
However, when the moment finally came and the stick was placed in her hands, Maria didn't opt out. She didn’t even share a hint of her agony with the other partygoers. Maria obediently stepped up and struck her hero. Even in the moment of the violence itself, Maria knew she did it because she wanted to fit in more than she wanted to avoid the terrible custom. The choice felt like cowardice. The choice felt like sin.
To make matters worse, Maria hung back to the very end of the line trying to delay her inevitable part in the brutal rite, and this just made it worse in the end. By waiting, by allowing all her classmates to strike Cinderella first, the weak perfunctory blow Maria laid upon Cinderella's guts didn't just glance off with a muted thwack. It broke her. It ripped Cinderella open and spilled her sweets.
With feigned excitement Maria scrambled for the candy along with the rest of the children. She hated herself as she did so. Alone in her room that night she cried gooey sobs into her pillow. Then a nightmare visited itself upon her the next night and returned once a month from that point forward. Maria soon knew this was stupid, but it was also sad and true.
Six years later, her guts swamped with dread, ten-year-old Maria walked into Christ's sanctuary made into the celebration hall for Rosa's birthday party. Maria knew a piñata was waiting for her. She searched it out immediately. Who would the dreadful piñata be this time? Whose image would she have to beat?
Maria located the piñata within seconds. It was just in front of the chancel steps leading to the altar table a few feet away. When Maria saw the piñata, she was astonished. More accurately, once she laid eyes on it, she felt physically lighter. She felt unbound and free.
The piñata was not Cinderella or Snow White or even Spiderman. It wasn't in the shape of anyone. It was in the form of an artless blob of red, blue, and pink streamers.
Was it a star? Was it a flower? What was it? She didn't know, and she didn't care. What mattered was that this piñata was no one, and so it was a piñata Maria could beat with reckless abandon. Maria volunteered to be the first to take a crack at it.
She took the stick and donned the yellow bandana blindfold. Rosa's father spun her far too many times while he laughed at her growing dizziness. He'd always been a bit of a prick like that, and Maria became woozy, dizzy, and disoriented.
Still she swung with all her force. She was giddy with joy as she took her chance to hit this faceless thing and for once get lost in the violence of the ritual.
Maria missed. Completely whiffed. More than that, as a right hander, the ferocity of her swing spun her to the left, toward the crucifix-capped altar with its bloody Christ statue frowning down from above.
The force of Maria’s swing did more than spin her. It threw her to her knees, which caught the sharp corner of a chancel step when she fell. The pain forced a cry from her. Still clutching the stick in her right hand, Maria ripped the bandana off with her left and looked up to get her bearings.
To Maria’s eyes the piñata had been transformed. It was no longer the person-less paper star she so desired to obliterate. The piñata had become Christ himself, hanging there, beaten, broken open, spilling. And Maria held the stick.
Maria was a smart girl, rational and wise. On some level, part of her knew this was silly and not so. She knew that her location and not the form of the piñata had shifted. But in that moment Maria was in a more primal part of her mind, a part of herself more comfortable with mystery and absurdity.
In shock at the sight of the beaten Christ she fell backwards off the step and landed hard on the floor, her head smacking the concrete. But through it all Maria kept her eyes on the Jesus piñata, its face of anguished love looking down into her own face with the holy table in between them.
And then the statue spoke to her. The mouth did not move. Maria heard no sound. The piñata, the crucifix, Jesus himself, spoke to her with lights and colors, the combination speaking as clearly to her as words moving along sound waves.
The ten year old Maria knew what the Lord said to her as surely as the forty year old Maria knew her Audi cost $47K and that she'd been a certified public accountant for 16 years.
Jesus said to her, "Maria, I AM and I live. I can do all things. I receive killing blows and share sweetness from my wounds. I transform the table of my sorrow into a place of laughter for children. I am the author and perfector of all things. My will shall be done. Be set free. Stand up and serve at my table."
Then it was over. Maria was tired and sore, her body tight and cramped. She tasted blood from a gash in her tongue.
When the vision faded, Maria noticed there were adults all around her searching her eyes with theirs. She could not see any of her friends. The children were elsewhere.
Some of the adults were strangers who wore simple blue shirts and pants. On the strangers’ shirts were printed the letters “E” and “M” and “T”. All the adults looked serious and by looking so serious made Maria worried when moments before she'd been transfixed by the voice of her Lord, and she had been in the bosom of peace.
The crucifix was hanging on the wall as it had for more years than Maria had been alive. As it had always been, the crucifix was pale and cheap and bleeding what looked like lipstick from its feet, hands and side. The tissue paper blob of a piñata hung there slightly to the right of the altar table. The piñata was still whole and untouched.
Lying very still upon the concrete floor Maria gestured for the birthday girl’s father to come near. He did, although he clearly didn’t understand why she’d first asked for him and not for her own parents.
After he leaned in, Maria pointed to the piñata, and whispered a question into his ear. He nodded and said, “Yes, sure, of course, yes,” and as he did so he wondered how scrambled Maria's brains remained.
Her parents took Maria to a doctor who explained that the accident had caused her to have something called a seizure. Maria's parents told her she’d been unconscious, kicking, and writhing for five long minutes. Maria took tests and was inserted into funny machines and took special medication until she was fifteen. The medicine made her tired. She hated the medicine.
At the age of forty Maria is sure she had a seizure, but she is also sure she was spoken to.
Sometimes, when her children are asleep and she is weary from contemplating the gaping hole in the bed where her former husband once slept, Maria will rise. She will go to her closet, reach to the highest shelf, and take down a large box.
In the box is an artless papier-mâché blob festooned with toilet paper strips of blue and red and pink. Maria will sit on her bed, stroke the antique streamers and know again that she is unbounded and free. She will know again the speaking colors and the truth that nothing is too great for the Lord.
She will know again that there will come a day when she will stand at the Table as a priest commissioned by the Risen Jesus to break his body and share the sweetness of his salvation.
And on the day that this finally comes to pass, Maria will break open this piñata and taste the candy hidden within.
But what mattered more was that Maria herself was a Catholic, and she would remain one. It was an indelible, irreplaceable, and in some ways, irreparable part of her identity.
Just as non-negotiable was Maria’s conviction that she was to be a priest. Someday and some way she was to be someone set aside to shape the word of Christ with her lips and to raise the wafer the Spirit touched and made His body. It was her calling to share the flesh of God fractured to re-create of the world.
Even now, thirty years later, with the deadening impact of middle age's full fury imposing itself upon her, Maria could remember the moment she received her call to the priesthood.
Although Texan, her family had been poor and Mexican by ancestry, and Maria’s church had been poor and Mexican. Pathetically so, Maria thought as she sat in her Audi as an adult, frozen in traffic, and wandering back into her memory.
Their congregation could only afford one large room in which to gather as a community. On Sunday morning the room was, of course, a house of worship arranged for Mass.
However, if you’d visited that very same space twelve hours earlier, you might have found yourself in a bare-bones parlor arranged for a lady's book club, or a simple medical clinic checking the blood pressure of homeless men, or a hall stinking of burnt coffee and people resisting addiction.
Yet, at some point, in a manner that was in its own way as wondrous as the consecration of the bread and cup during mass, the chairs would be moved and the banners hung. At some point Clark Kent would enter his telephone booth, rip off his shirt and tie, and Superman would emerge. The ugly room would be reborn a sanctuary for Christ's body, a space in which to worship, a beachhead in Heaven’s invasion of Earth.
And sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, before the magic of transformation occurred, their cheap all-purpose church hall would become a place for a child's birthday party. Streamers hanging from the altar. Balloons drooping from the walls on either side of the sculpted body of a dead Jesus.
This was the stage on which the memory of Maria's call to the priesthood played out.
Her friend Rosa, the birthday girl, had told Maria at school on Friday that the party would have a piñata. Rosa shared the news in a state of high anticipation. Maria received the news with distaste and anxiety.
Now Maria liked candy. Sure she did. She was a child, after all, and piñatas always ended in an orgy of candy. But it was the getting to that end-point which struck Maria, even at the age of ten, as off-kilter, brutal, and perverse.
To that point in Maria’s life all the piñatas she’d known were shaped like people. She remembered the first one she’d encountered. She couldn't forget it. She had been four.
Maria had recently fallen in love with the Disney version of Cinderella. She'd already planned her home-made Halloween costume around it and learned all the songs showcased in the movie. Due to her devotion to Disney’s Cinderella, Maria had even gone so far as to reassess her position on mice.
In the midst of her Cinderella madness, the four-year-old Maria had walked into a friend's backyard for a birthday party and seen the piñata – a papier-mâché Cinderella hanging from a tree as if lynched.
This was a horror-show vision, at least for Maria. It did not compute. She was supposed to bludgeon her hero, or at least her hero’s effigy, and this was supposed to be fun? Who does that kind of thing?
However, when the moment finally came and the stick was placed in her hands, Maria didn't opt out. She didn’t even share a hint of her agony with the other partygoers. Maria obediently stepped up and struck her hero. Even in the moment of the violence itself, Maria knew she did it because she wanted to fit in more than she wanted to avoid the terrible custom. The choice felt like cowardice. The choice felt like sin.
To make matters worse, Maria hung back to the very end of the line trying to delay her inevitable part in the brutal rite, and this just made it worse in the end. By waiting, by allowing all her classmates to strike Cinderella first, the weak perfunctory blow Maria laid upon Cinderella's guts didn't just glance off with a muted thwack. It broke her. It ripped Cinderella open and spilled her sweets.
With feigned excitement Maria scrambled for the candy along with the rest of the children. She hated herself as she did so. Alone in her room that night she cried gooey sobs into her pillow. Then a nightmare visited itself upon her the next night and returned once a month from that point forward. Maria soon knew this was stupid, but it was also sad and true.
Six years later, her guts swamped with dread, ten-year-old Maria walked into Christ's sanctuary made into the celebration hall for Rosa's birthday party. Maria knew a piñata was waiting for her. She searched it out immediately. Who would the dreadful piñata be this time? Whose image would she have to beat?
Maria located the piñata within seconds. It was just in front of the chancel steps leading to the altar table a few feet away. When Maria saw the piñata, she was astonished. More accurately, once she laid eyes on it, she felt physically lighter. She felt unbound and free.
The piñata was not Cinderella or Snow White or even Spiderman. It wasn't in the shape of anyone. It was in the form of an artless blob of red, blue, and pink streamers.
Was it a star? Was it a flower? What was it? She didn't know, and she didn't care. What mattered was that this piñata was no one, and so it was a piñata Maria could beat with reckless abandon. Maria volunteered to be the first to take a crack at it.
She took the stick and donned the yellow bandana blindfold. Rosa's father spun her far too many times while he laughed at her growing dizziness. He'd always been a bit of a prick like that, and Maria became woozy, dizzy, and disoriented.
Still she swung with all her force. She was giddy with joy as she took her chance to hit this faceless thing and for once get lost in the violence of the ritual.
Maria missed. Completely whiffed. More than that, as a right hander, the ferocity of her swing spun her to the left, toward the crucifix-capped altar with its bloody Christ statue frowning down from above.
The force of Maria’s swing did more than spin her. It threw her to her knees, which caught the sharp corner of a chancel step when she fell. The pain forced a cry from her. Still clutching the stick in her right hand, Maria ripped the bandana off with her left and looked up to get her bearings.
To Maria’s eyes the piñata had been transformed. It was no longer the person-less paper star she so desired to obliterate. The piñata had become Christ himself, hanging there, beaten, broken open, spilling. And Maria held the stick.
Maria was a smart girl, rational and wise. On some level, part of her knew this was silly and not so. She knew that her location and not the form of the piñata had shifted. But in that moment Maria was in a more primal part of her mind, a part of herself more comfortable with mystery and absurdity.
In shock at the sight of the beaten Christ she fell backwards off the step and landed hard on the floor, her head smacking the concrete. But through it all Maria kept her eyes on the Jesus piñata, its face of anguished love looking down into her own face with the holy table in between them.
And then the statue spoke to her. The mouth did not move. Maria heard no sound. The piñata, the crucifix, Jesus himself, spoke to her with lights and colors, the combination speaking as clearly to her as words moving along sound waves.
The ten year old Maria knew what the Lord said to her as surely as the forty year old Maria knew her Audi cost $47K and that she'd been a certified public accountant for 16 years.
Jesus said to her, "Maria, I AM and I live. I can do all things. I receive killing blows and share sweetness from my wounds. I transform the table of my sorrow into a place of laughter for children. I am the author and perfector of all things. My will shall be done. Be set free. Stand up and serve at my table."
Then it was over. Maria was tired and sore, her body tight and cramped. She tasted blood from a gash in her tongue.
When the vision faded, Maria noticed there were adults all around her searching her eyes with theirs. She could not see any of her friends. The children were elsewhere.
Some of the adults were strangers who wore simple blue shirts and pants. On the strangers’ shirts were printed the letters “E” and “M” and “T”. All the adults looked serious and by looking so serious made Maria worried when moments before she'd been transfixed by the voice of her Lord, and she had been in the bosom of peace.
The crucifix was hanging on the wall as it had for more years than Maria had been alive. As it had always been, the crucifix was pale and cheap and bleeding what looked like lipstick from its feet, hands and side. The tissue paper blob of a piñata hung there slightly to the right of the altar table. The piñata was still whole and untouched.
Lying very still upon the concrete floor Maria gestured for the birthday girl’s father to come near. He did, although he clearly didn’t understand why she’d first asked for him and not for her own parents.
After he leaned in, Maria pointed to the piñata, and whispered a question into his ear. He nodded and said, “Yes, sure, of course, yes,” and as he did so he wondered how scrambled Maria's brains remained.
Her parents took Maria to a doctor who explained that the accident had caused her to have something called a seizure. Maria's parents told her she’d been unconscious, kicking, and writhing for five long minutes. Maria took tests and was inserted into funny machines and took special medication until she was fifteen. The medicine made her tired. She hated the medicine.
At the age of forty Maria is sure she had a seizure, but she is also sure she was spoken to.
Sometimes, when her children are asleep and she is weary from contemplating the gaping hole in the bed where her former husband once slept, Maria will rise. She will go to her closet, reach to the highest shelf, and take down a large box.
In the box is an artless papier-mâché blob festooned with toilet paper strips of blue and red and pink. Maria will sit on her bed, stroke the antique streamers and know again that she is unbounded and free. She will know again the speaking colors and the truth that nothing is too great for the Lord.
She will know again that there will come a day when she will stand at the Table as a priest commissioned by the Risen Jesus to break his body and share the sweetness of his salvation.
And on the day that this finally comes to pass, Maria will break open this piñata and taste the candy hidden within.