The ache of lost home

That's what the Greek roots of our word "nostalgia" mean. I have lived long enough that such feelings are an occupational hazard. And it's a grey and rainy morning, to boot.

What brought it on? Wandering through the blogosphere, my own form of free association, I came upon the story of Sir Alec Guiness' conversion to Catholicism.

Filming one of GK Chesterton's Father Brown stories in France, he kept his costume cassock on as he went home to his hotel. All of a sudden, a young boy walked up next to him and took his hand, called him "Mon pere" and started gabbing with him. He was so struck by the trust of the child in him just because of how he appeared, that it provoked the kind of curiousity that eventuated in his conversion years later.

Nowadays, such a story would be unbelievable. And that is very sad.

I was an altar boy. I learned the Latin of the Mass by heart, using a phonetic booklet. I spent a lot of time with priests when I was young. One in particular took an interest in me when I was in 7th and 8th grade, had me accompany him on pastoral errands, even on trips to the beach or the park. He was a darkly handsome, charismatic man in his thirties. I realized years later that I had a serious crush on him. But he never did anything remotely untoward. Nor did any of the others.

It turned into a wierd joke in the gym one day last year, chatting with another guy who grew up in the same era as me, another untouched altar boy. He said, "What was wrong with us? Not cute enough? Were we chopped liver?"

When I was a kid, priests were kind, or interesting, or intimidatingly severe. But they were never a threat to your safety. In a pinch, even the cranky old Irish pastor was dependable.

Sad that things are not like that anymore.

I knew a parish priest for a while. A gay man struggling with that issue, but certainly one without any interest in teenagers, much less children. But the news was full of all the pedophilia. I was in the vestibule of the church after Mass one Sunday and he was chatting with parishioners, when a little boy about four ran down the aisle toward him, smiling, with his arms out, heading for him.

The priest reached down when the kid arrived and picked him up in his arms and then I saw the look in his eyes, the fear that the people would see a priest and a child and ....He put the little fella down in what he tried to make a fluid motion. But I saw the look.

Sad that things are like that now.

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