Features Short Story Contest Second Place Winner Miserere Nobis

Author: Michael O'Brien

Editor's Note: The opinions and themes expressed in the piece are those of the author and not of The Middlebury Campus.



"This fellow said, 'I am able to destroy the temple of God, and rebuild it in three days.'"

After we finish, the narrator intones, "And the high priest stood up and said," and the deacon continues, "Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?"

Perhaps I should start earlier. The Passion story is read no less than three times (I know from experience) over the course of Easter Week, the first today, Palm Sunday. It is presented as a sort of play, with the deacon playing any extraneous characters, some prominent parish personage narrates and the priest of course impersonates Jesus. The crowd of church-goers do any lines spoken by two or more people, mostly mobs and soldiers, and this text is printed in bold in the missalettes so that we don't miss it. The interesting thing is that most of the lines in bold are pretty strongly anti-Jesus, yet the people in the audience here just kind of intone them as if they were the narrator or even Jesus himself. As an actor it offends me. Here now, look at the opportunity for sarcasm and scorn:

"Now the chief priests and the whole council sought false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. At last two came forward and said, "not there, here: "This fellow said, 'I am able to destroy the temple of God, and rebuild it in three days.'"

By six o'clock, darkness was starting to filter in through the stained glass windows that encircle the church. Easter was early this year and late March is still winter, at least as far north as I am. I was at the night Mass, unfortunately, since I'd slept past all the morning and noon service times being up all night trying to solve all my problems before the dawn came. It's a fairly normal occurrence with me.

I say "unfortunately" because Sunday night Mass is the youth club mass, and I'm standing off to the side of a bunch of teenagers who like their Psalms set to rock music, and across from a group of adults who oblige them. Jeans must be in this year for girls, as I noticed when they all came up and joined hands in a circle around the altar — a fairy ring of potential jailbait. Some demonic part of my impulses wonders if I would have joined their little love-fest if the group had started a few years earlier, when I was still old enough to enlist.

The bold letters come around again, and I'm not paying attention, again. "He deserves death." "Then they spat in his face, and struck him and some slapped him, saying," "Prophesy to us, you Christ! Who is it that struck you?"

The kids are at the very front of the central column of pews, admittedly the focus of the teen Mass. The rest of us are incidentals; we should have gone to the real Masses earlier in the day. I notice a pair of parents nudging each other and looking to their right, where their progeny sits. I wonder whether they're noticing how little Janey is talking to all those boys when she should be paying attention to the Gospel or congratulating themselves on how good and religious their little son or daughter is being. I try to see who it is they're peeking at, but there's a large Mexican family blocking my view.

I wish I was back at college, where I wouldn't have to deal with all of this. Since I'm at home, my parents expect me to be gone for an hour today, with a little time afterward to be occupied by confession. The signs have been left on the confessional doors from earlier sessions: Fr. Guadalupe, Msgr. O'Casey. Probably Mass'll take more than an hour, since the whole Bible-line-tradeoff rigmarole takes a lot longer than the usual fifteen verses.

"Certainly you are also one of them, for your accent betrays you."

"Then he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear,"

"I do not know the man."

Sometimes I wonder why I don't just go to a Starbucks for an hour and a half and go home with a spiritually uplifted expression on my face.

In any case, I won't say that nothing good has ever come of going to Mass. I met Judy at one of the first masses at school, even if we don't go anymore. She was wearing an ankh under her shirt, and I had tucked a long wallet chain into my pants pocket. I noticed a girl who reminds me of Judy over in the center section, squeezed between a fat football player wearing an undershirt and a girl whose pink shirt-sleeves look like wings. She looks like she'll suffer through it all right.

"—at is that to us? See to it yourself." I try to come in on the end. The acoustics are pretty bad from where I'm sitting and it doesn't sound loud enough to be a few hundred people saying the line all at once. Still that fantastical chorus effect comes off, where every one of the chanters seems to be contemporaneous with the others, and the pitiful few, before and after, who are off, get averaged out, smoothed and assimilated into the greater whole.

I'm watching the girl again, the pseudo-Judy, and I see the jock say something that is obviously supposed to pass over her in the directions of her wingéd neighbor. Heh. She rolls her eyes just like Judy did. The estranged couple doesn't seem to notice.

There isn't a bold line for another half of a page, so I'm safe to look around the church. It's funny the differences one notices after having been to a number of them. I can't help but notice the huge tile mural behind the altar depicting Jesus risen from the dead. He's smiling, in a serious way, and huge white robes are flowing out all over the place. This is quite a change from most churches, where they usually have a hugely gruesome crucifix, looking as if it's going to drop blood on the priest's head at any moment. I suppose the mural is indicative of the whole church's approach, just like the youth group — Catholic Lite. Well, it is dedicated to a woman saint.

"Crucify him! Crucify him!"

That girl really looks like Judy. She's wearing a thin purple shirt, open, over a black top, and she seems to be wearing purple lipstick too. Dark eyeshadow over it and there's a nice balance of dark colors and darker ones. She lifts a hand to brush her hair, a nervous gesture, and I can see some sort of twisted silver bracelet around her wrist. Maybe I'll be able to check her out more completely when she gets up to receive Communion.

"They only shouted the louder," her mouth opens to recite "Crucify him! Crucify him!"

And I can't see her teeth. Judy's two front teeth had kind of a large gap between them. I used to call her my bucktoothed beauty, which apparently she didn't really like, as one day she walked in after taking a test and I said, looking at my computer screen, "And how did my bucktoothed beauty do on her test?" She threw a mug at me, which passed between my nose and the monitor and smashed against the heater under the window. I asked her what the hell that was for, and … "And you just like me because I look like your mother, who you—" I didn't let her finish and hit her in the face, which knocked her across my bed and into the wall.

I feel the sudden need to get out of church, so I get up and begin to make my way out the aisle.

"His blood be upon us and upon our children."

At the door my hand automatically reaches out and dips into the holy water basin. In the darkened vestibule I wipe at my eyes with blessed fingers and put on my coat. The walls and doors of the room were made of glass and the sun had already set. Starbucks it is then.

There was a booklet in the vestibule that caught my eye as I pushed the door open. It was entitled "Women of the Bible," and the cover illustration was of some purple-robed woman with a huge sword putting a man's severed head
into a sack. His mouth hung slackly open and his eyes were glazed and had nearly rolled up into his head. The scene was dimly lit and centered by a massive wooden tent pole that rose up from behind the woman's head.

The moment the glass door swung shut behind me I reached for a cigarette and fumbled with a match. The burning ash lit my way to the car.