Say Grace or The Adventures of a Simpleton

In recent years (when many people think we shall soon see the end of the world!) there has arisen a disease among humble and arrogant folk [that makes them claim their religion is the right one].(1)

A long time ago, when I was a child in the 70s, I didn’t know that people believed in something called God. We didn’t mention God in our house. We had several books on Greek sculpture and Renaissance art. I remember Mom pointing out Zeus. I thought God meant marble statue. When I compare myself to children today, I was a simpleton. Okay, to be fair, I avoided conflict. I heard people joke on television that politics and religion should never be discussed, so I avoided these topics. It was so simple. I thought Easter was about hiding eggs and Christmas was about trees. It was a vacation on the calendar like Thanksgiving, Victoria Day (Firecracker day), or Dominion Day (Summer Firecracker day). Beyond that I had no opinion.

In the 70s, we moved from Mississauga to the country. At that time, the country was anything beyond Trafalgar Road in Oakville, Ontario. And we were far from civilization in the rural routes of farms and forests.

One day, a friend from school invited me for dinner to her family’s farm. I was only seven years old. I think they were a family of 13 children. Large dairy farm, huge dining table, lots of trophies and ribbons for best cow, best in show, best jumper (that was the oldest daughter, horseback riding), best track-and-field (all of them), best piano recital (middle-child, my friend). These were top-notch people. But they were a rough crowd, more feral than their docile cows in the pasture. The cows were grass-fed, the family corn-fed. Competitive with each other, snarling and hissing in their own sibling language.

We sat down to a dinner of potatoes and roast beef. The father of the family turned to me.
“Does your family say Grace?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” I said, trying to sound comfortable, initiated with this overwhelming family, but truly, I had no idea what he was talking about.
One of the many sons yelled across the table, “Yeah, make her say Grace, Dad!”

I honestly thought they wanted me to say the word Grace, so I said it as a question, Grace?
They thought I was nervous but I didn’t understand. The only Grace I knew was a Portuguese girl in Mississauga. I looked around the table. There would be no social cues, no reading between the trophies. So this young father (he was probably 35 at the time) thanked the Lord for the food on the table. I looked around the room. Everyone had their eyes closed.
Who was Lord? Who was this man talking to?
And what happened to Grace? Was he telling Grace to tell Lord?
It’s so funny now to think I didn’t understand, but I had never really attended church. Once, when I was five, I remember going to a church in Mississauga wearing white gloves and a frilly white dress in May. (We were carrying Easter baskets.)

My parents were old people compared to this farm family. By the time I came into being my parents had long given up religion. They just assumed I knew enough. Strange, considering the only bible we had was a small black book in one of my mother’s dresser drawers, stuffed under some perfume boxes, jewelry, and what I learned later was a diaphragm. I wasn’t a reader. And when I was older and received the Narnia books, I just thought it was a pretty fairy tale. Aslan was a lion. Edmund was an idiot. Why all the drama with the sacrifice? A fairy tale. Close the book and go outside.

One hot July day, I came back inside. I had heard friends talking about Sunday school. I was curious. They seemed to have fun. I stepped into a church on one of those unpaved concession roads. Parents were fanning themselves with handouts and hats. My friends had made paper crafts. They pranced across a stage showing off pictures they had drawn about the world as we perceived it and the heavenly world. One girl had a picture of a gorilla and when she turned the paper 90 degrees, it spelled her name. I liked that trick. That impressed me. Other children talked about someone called their Savior. I told my mother later, “It looks like they have fun, but I think religion seems to be mixed up in it. Someone called Jesus.”
“Well, that’s what Sunday school is about,” my mother told me.
“Is that a good idea?” I said, but my tone was more like, “Is that safe?”

I wanted to know if it made sense for me to go. Was I supposed to learn something? Did my friends know something I didn’t?
“You can go if you want,” my mother said, “but we’re not Baptists.”
“What’s a Baptist?”
My much older sister walked in, hearing our conversation, “They’re fanatics.”
It was all in her tone.
“So, I shouldn’t go?”
“Try reading for change.” She was the one who later bought me the Narnia books.

At school, in the fall, I made a new friend. At the parent-teacher’s night my new friend’s mother declared that we could be friends because she heard we were registered Catholics.
My new friend, Mary, attended catechism. I learned that several other girls I played with at recess attended catechism as well. I wanted to go. And so one Sunday, my mother dropped me off at the town’s local Catholic Church. An older woman, a volunteer, instructed me to follow the other children downstairs to a hall. We sat on plastic chairs in a circle around a middle-aged woman. She held a postcard of the nativity scene. She pointed to “the baby Jesus” and then to “who’s that? That’s Mary,” and then to, “look at the star, do you see the star?” I feigned interest by shifting my body forward in my chair, trying to get a closer look at the postcard, all the while, wishing my mother had not dropped me off. This inane catechism lasted an hour. Very bad baby-sitting for me, unbelievably ineffective proselytizing. How did this Catholic Church keep anyone? Here I was hungry for information. Maybe my sister was wrong about the Baptists—at least they were doing crafts.
“So how did it go?” my mother asked me when I closed the car door.
“The treat us like babies.”

I later found out that I had been put in the lowest catechism group because I had never been exposed to any Catholic teaching. Bad decision. I never went back. Did Mary remain my friend? Well, she invited me to her birthday party several months later and I had made other friends by then. As for Grace in Mississauga, I have no idea what became of her or what happened to the large farm family of 13 children. And to this day, I still feel a little nervous when I dine with friends who say grace, but they know better than to ask me. Grace?