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, an irreparable part of her identity.
Just as non-negotiable in Maria’s guts was the conviction that she was to be a priest. Someday, some way, she was to be someone set aside to shape the word of Christ with her lips, to raise the wafer that the Spirit touched and made His body, 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 beginning to weigh upon her, Maria could remember the moment she received her call to the priesthood.
Although Texans, her family had been poor and Mexican. Her church had been poor and Mexican. Pathetically so, Maria thought as she sat in her Audi as an adult, frozen in traffic, wandering back into 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. Yet if you had visited that very same space twelve hours earlier, you might find 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 Host, 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 say mass, a beachhead of 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. The birthday girl shared the news in a state of high anticipation. Maria received the news with distaste.
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 her, even at the age of ten, as off-kilter, brutal, and distasteful.
To that point in Maria’s life all the piñatas with whom she had had dealings were shaped like people. She remembered the first. She couldn't forget it. She had been four.
Maria had fallen in love with the Disney version of Cinderella. She had already planned her home-made Halloween costume around it, learned the songs, and even reassessed her position on mice.
In the midst of her Cinderella madness, the four-year-old Maria had walked into a friend's backyard for the girl's birthday party and seen the piñata -- a papier-mâché Cinderella hanging from a tree, lynched, 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? Who does that kind of thing?
When the moment finally came, and the stick was placed in her hands, Maria didn't opt out, or even let her agony be known. She struck her hero. Even in the moment, 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.
But before Maria dealt the blow, she hung back to the very end of the line trying to delay the inevitable. 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 hating herself a little as she did so. But alone in her room that night she cried and did not know for years why she’d shed the tears. A nightmare came the next night and once a month from that point forward. It was stupid, but it was also sad and true.
Six years later Maria walked into Christ's sanctuary morphed into hall for Rosa's birthday with dread. She knew a piñata was waiting for her. She searched it out immediately deciding to get the miserable mystery over with. What would the dreadful piñata be this time?
Maria located it within seconds. It was just in front of the chancel steps leading up to the altar table which stood just 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 didn't care. What mattered was that this was a piñata she could beat with reckless abandon. Maria volunteered to be the first to take a crack at it.
Maria 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 had always been a bit of a jerk like that, and Maria was woozy, dizzy, and disoriented.
Still she swung with all her force giddy with joy at having a chance to hit this faceless thing and for once get lost in the violence of an odd custom.
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. As it did so, the force of her swing threw her to her knees, which caught the sharp corner of a chancel step. 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.
The piñata had been transformed. It was no longer the person-less paper star. It was 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, maybe it was the dizziness or her past experiences, but in the 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 she fell backwards off the step and landed hard on the floor, her head smacking the concrete. But Maria kept her eyes on the Jesus piñata, its face of anguished love looking down into her own with the holy table in between them.
And then it spoke to her. The mouth did not move. Maria heard no sound. The piñata, the crucifix, Jesus, spoke to her with lights and colors, the combination speaking as clearly to her as words 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 had 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.
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 worried and by looking so made Maria worried when moments before she had not been.
The crucifix was hanging on the wall as it had for years. Pale and cheap and bleeding what looked like lipstick from its feet and hands and side. The tissue paper blob of a piñata hung there slightly to the right of the altar table with its dying Jesus above it. The piñata was still whole and untouched.
Lying still upon the naked concrete floor Maria gestured for Rosa's father to come near. He did, although he clearly did not understand why she would first point for him and not her own parents. After he leaned in, Maria pointed to the piñata, and whispered a question in his ear. He nodded and said, “Yes, sure, of course, yes,” and as he did 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 had been unconscious, kicking, and writhing for five minutes. Maria took tests and was inserted into funny machines and took special medication until she was fifteen. The medicine made her tired.
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 of 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 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 unbound and free. She will know again the soundless but 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.