Icon of St. Lucy, 9" x 12", $100 OBO

St. Lucy is the patron saint of eyesight, and also an important figure on St. Joseph altars, where her disembodied eyes are represented by dried chickpeas. Grey's late mother, an artist, writer, and all-around fascinating character, was also named Lucy. I've been reading her journals, and I painted this with some of her old brushes and paints. (I made the little three-dimensional plate and eyeballs myself, too.)

Yesterday was rough. Chris and I never had much of an official anniversary per se. St. Joseph's Day (March 19) was always our thing. We'd visit altars in churches and private homes, sometimes as many as nine to make a novena, and gorge ourselves on wonderful food and Italian cookies and get our lucky fava beans and hear music and talk to people. Yesterday we didn't even talk to each other. We hardly ever do. I don't know if I would have gone out at all, but Joseph is the patron saint of houses and my mother is about to move into a new one, so I took her to the altar at St. Stephen's. It was very lovely, but there were a lot of people there from my old church, Our Lady of Good Counsel, some of whom I used to be very close to, and hardly any of them recognized me because I guess I look very different now, and I couldn't find the guts to identify myself to them. The party and the music swirled around me without touching me, something I used to be very much a part of, but now I'm on the outside of it. The fact that this is mostly by choice doesn't make it feel any less sad.

We did go up to the corner to see the Indians last night. St. Joseph's Night is so much more relaxed than Super Sunday. Big chiefs and second chiefs and spyboys and flagboys and tiny kids in huge feather suits, and everybody drumming. The Indians are probably my favorite part of living in Central City.

eBay auctions end this evening. Thanks for looking and bidding if you can.

Thanks for all the short story votes. "Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz" was the runaway winner (which made me happy, as I've always liked that story, especially since I visited my first St. Joseph altars while researching it), followed by "Self-Made Man." The latter story has already been online quite a bit, though, so I suggested the third runner-up, "Are You Loathsome Tonight?", as an alternate. I really appreciate the help.

It was a good weekend with many spoons and relatively manageable pain. I got a lot of gardening done: planted zinnias, a miniature peach rosebush, a purple pepper plant, lemon balm for the Green Goddess; made a good start at cleaning up the backyard;

(I stopped typing here and went outside, where a God damn Chihuahua tried to give my right foot a golden shower. It's amazing what can happen between one sentence and the next.)

...backyard; wanted to respond to more LJ comments, but had expended my energy. For now, I'll just say thanks so much for the advice re: wheelchairs and related gizmos.

I also have cherry tomatoes coming, but I eat them off the plant as fast as they can ripen. They make good little gardening snacks.

To somewhat counterbalance yesterday's vitriol, here are a couple of pictures of the gorgeous St. Joseph altar at St. Francis Xavier in Old Metairie.



Main portion of altar (there were also two big side tables equally full of beautiful food and decorations)



Fleur-de-lis fig cookie: It was inevitable. Those are lucky (fava) beans in the cup to the right; you carry one in your wallet so you'll never be broke.

By the way, there seem to be rumors floating around that St. Joseph altars in private homes are a thing of the past. Not at all; we always visit a few. They're not usually as grand as the church ones, but in some ways I find them more beautiful because they are personal labors of love and faith. Check the Times-Picayune classified ads next year and you'll find listings for several.

Have not felt much like Internetting lately. Nothing personal. I put a diary app in my brain on my iPhone to keep track of moods: OK, OK, fucking pit of despair, OK, why God why, OK ... maybe not quite that many OKs, honestly. But that's not for public consumption; that's for trying to track and fix my messed-up brain chemistry, which at this point feels somewhat like trying to regrow a leg. In lieu of all that, here's what I have read the past few days:

The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge by Jamie James (BEST SNAKE ADVENTURE STORY EVER)

Life in Cold Blood by David Attenborough

Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman

Bag of Bones and Cujo by Stephen King

As you see, I've gone for the comfort reading most recently. This is because, while I enjoyed my herpetological nonfiction, I found myself utterly unable to concentrate on anything as new and complex as (this is embarrassing) the Jonathan Kellerman novel I picked up at the drugstore. I find more enjoyment in stories I already practically know by heart. I wouldn't be at all surprised if my brain is getting smoother.

Also, we had St. Joseph's Day. I cooked casseroles and helped make cookie bags for the altar at St. Stephen's, then went visiting altars with Chris on Friday. I was going to post a couple of pictures of the beautiful and elaborate altar at St. Francis Xavier in Old Metairie, but Safari says it can't access the server they are on. Will try again later.

is tomorrow. Usually, at this time of year, I'm running around baking cookies and assembling casseroles and helping to decorate whatever altar I'm working on. This year, there has been none of that. This year I feel sort of closed off from what is usually my favorite day of the year.

I haven't done an update on the status of Our Lady of Good Counsel for a while, mainly because there's not much to say. All the charges against those of us who got arrested during the Epiphany raid were dropped. Our civil and canonical appeals are still in the system. We have not been allowed back in the church, not even to get our personal belongings (Chris and I suffered several cold nights this winter because our heaviest down comforter was in there, and we could not afford to replace it). We still hold a rosary service in front of OLGC every Sunday morning at 11:00, and, during Lent, we do the Way of the Cross each Friday at 5:30.

We were going to have a St. Joseph's altar, too. First we planned to have it in the parking lot, but they've shut off access to that. Then we decided a better idea anyway would be to have it in the three outside door bays and on the steps of the church. We wanted to call attention to the beautiful, historic building itself as well as to honor St. Joseph and demonstrate our continued, shared faith as a parish family. Well, it turned out that wouldn't fly, because St. Stephen's (a.k.a. Good Shepherd, the parish we and St. Henry were supposed to be "merged" with) is having an altar in their church, and they don't want the competition. They said we could have it in someone's house if we wanted to (big of them to tell people what they can do in their own houses, no?), but since one of the major points was to draw attention to the plight of our church, we didn't go for that.

Competition.

To me, this seems a lot like saying you don't want another church open near yours on Good Friday because you don't want the competition. (Does this make sense? In New Orleans, Catholics try to visit nine churches on Good Friday, so it's helpful to have as many open as possible. Also, OLGC is one of the nine churches on the traditional walking route. I don't know if they do this in other places.) Most people who go to St. Joseph's altars don't visit just one or two; they enjoy making the rounds. Many people even like to make a novena, visiting nine altars -- we hope to do so this year, to ask for Chris' success with his new restaurant venture -- and, obviously, the more altars you have and the closer together they are, the more easily this can be done.

As well, if you have a devotion to St. Joseph, you don't view other altars to him as "competition." You want him to be honored as fully as possible, with as much food and joy and music and drink and laughter and lucky beanage as everyone cares to provide. Unless you're St. Stephen's, apparently.

I'm talking about the administration here, of course. I have dear friends from OLGC who are working on the St. Stephen's altar. My own godmother, Rosary, is working on it, and she taught me much of what I know about cooking for St. Joseph's Day. I wish I could bring myself to work on it myself, but I'm still too angry at what the archdiocese did to us to give any of my resources to St. Stephen's, so I feel as if I'm not practicing what I preach. It's for St. Joseph. What does it matter where the thing is held? Yet I cannot make myself look past it.

You may ask why St. Stephen's has any say over whether OLGC does or doesn't have an altar. Technically, they don't. (I suppose the archdiocese could say we were trespassing and have the police drag us and our altar off the steps, but I doubt that even they are that tone-deaf. Of course, I've been wrong about that before.) However, some of the core OLGC group feels that our best chance of getting anything done about our church lies in trying to cooperate with Monsignor Christopher Nalty, the pastor of St. Stephen's. Msgr. Nalty has done little to actually help us, but he does acknowledge that we've been brutalized by the archdiocese, and he is not opposed to letting something happen at OLGC at some unspecified point in the future. That's really all he can say, because he doesn't have the power to promise us anything. (The archdiocese won't even give him a key to OLGC, even though it is part of his physical parish now.) Maybe they'll let us open the church on Good Friday. Maybe we'll be allowed to do something for Our Lady of Good Counsel's feast day in April. Maybe we'll have one Mass a month said by a visiting priest. Maybe golden monkeys will fly out of the archbishop's butt and give us all stimulus packages. As you can see, I don't think much of this plan. Unfortunately, I don't have a better one. I could print up a flyer about why they won't let us have an altar and get a bowl of lucky beans and go sit on the church steps all day tomorrow passing them out to people, but 99% of the people passing by wouldn't care, and Chris and I would have sacrificed our St. Joseph's Day. As it is, there aren't as many altars as there used to be, and to have any hope of making nine, I think we're going to have to start out on the Westbank, cut back through New Orleans, and finish up in Metairie -- not impossible, we've done longer trips before, but it would be great if you could still count on hitting nine without leaving Orleans Parish. Or maybe Orleans and St. Bernard, since they used to do some wonderful altars out there.

Despite all the archdiocese's apparent attempts to make me do so, I have not abandoned my religion. I go to the weekly rosary services, and sometimes I go to Mass at St. Mary's Assumption, a nondiocesan church where one of the two priests strikes me as an interesting renegade. But I am unquiet in my heart, and sometimes I am sore afraid.

I promise I'll move on to another subject soon, but you have to realize that this religious thing is a huge deal for me right now. Anyway, a reader asked how my "journey to Catholicism" began. As best I can recall, it started with trying to write accurately about characters (the Stubbs family) who had varying degrees of Catholic faith. It soon became obvious to me that there was more going on in these characters' minds and hearts than I understood. I didn't agree with everything their faith made them do -- e.g. Mary Rose and Elmer Stubbs conspiring to split up the boys in The Value of X -- but I could see that it was valuable to them, valuable enough so that G-man could never quite turn loose of it even though he felt that the Church had rejected him and his life partner hated it. Things really began to crystallize when I started writing the short story "Bayou de la Mère," which was originally inspired by a late-night walk through St. Martinville, Louisiana during which Chris and I observed two different statues: a perfectly normal Virgin Mother near St. Martin de Tours Cathedral, and the seated, blank-eyed, (to me) extremely creepy Cajun heroine Evangeline in the old cemetery behind the cathedral. These statues merged in my mind and a tale began to ferment. I wrote to Doug Winter, who is something of an expert on such matters, asking him to recommend movies that contained creepy Catholic imagery. One of the movies he mentioned was Stigmata, which he said was a terrible movie but contained some good imagery. I thought it was an OK movie myself, but I wasn't as struck by the imagery as I was by the piece of Gnostic text that comes up again and again, purporting to be the words of Christ: "Lift a piece of wood and you will find me; split open a stone and I am there," or something very close to that.

This really resonated with me for some reason (and still does). Previously, I had only been to Mass twice in my life: once by accident, when I stumbled into the middle of one at Our Lady of Guadelupe on Rampart Street while attempting to deliver a petition to St. Expedite, and once for a friend's funeral. Now I began to wonder if there was something there for me besides research, and I started intermittently attending Masses at different Catholic churches all over the city. I didn't explore any religion other than Catholicism, because it is such a vital part of the founding and fabric of New Orleans that I knew it would be the one for me if any was. Eventually I got to Our Lady of Good Counsel -- mostly because they had (and have) late-afternoon Masses on weekends, which fit well with my schedule -- and immediately felt more comfortable and welcome there than I had anywhere else. I attended services there off and on for about five years. I also became much more serious about the St. Joseph altar tradition, which I had previously viewed as a kind of trick-or-treat for foodies and New Orleans culture vultures (both of which I am, of course).

So that's how it began. Although I've been preparing to be received into the Church since before Christmas, I think my decision was really only finalized a couple of weeks ago, when I was working on the St. Joseph altar. I realized I was proud of what I was doing there and ashamed of what I would do when I got home. Basically, I decided the way I was living was not good enough for me. Some core of will I didn't know I still had rose up within me, and I promised myself and the Powers That Be that after St. Joseph's Day I would stop abusing painkillers. The decision came in a form I can only call a thought-bolt: "Look, you can either keep fucking up and probably get a heroin habit and spiral into ghetto life and maybe destroy your family -- and if you're going to do that, there is really no reason to go ahead with your plans to join the Church -- or you can get your shit together RIGHT -- FUCKING -- NOW."

And I've pretty much had it together since then. Since that actual moment, it feels like, though I did write petitions at all the St. Joseph altars we visited asking him to help me find a way to live with pain without abusing drugs and hurting my family. And I don't know what the ultimate effects will be, but people who have no idea what I did over the weekend keep telling me that I look radiant, that the stress is gone from my face, and so forth. Part of this could be due to the drugs leaving my system. Yes, I am still in a lot of physical pain, and that's where Stephen King comes in, as he usually does if you look deeply enough into anything I do. I decided to reread Needful Things -- a novel that I admit gets somewhat goofy at points, but there was a moment in this particular reading of it valuable enough to compensate for any flaws, when the arthritis-crippled heroine throws away the supernatural cure and rejects its source:

Pain instantly clawed its way into her hands like some small and hungry animal ... but she knew even then that the pain was not as great as she had feared; nowhere near as great as she had feared.

I had no supernatural cure, just many bottles of various pills, but I knew it was true that when you are in chronic physical and/or emotional pain -- and especially when you get used to having at least some relief from it -- you become very frightened of its return, and the fear itself makes the pain worse. I suspect that Stephen King, also an addict, knows this too. I decided that, while I might still live in great pain, I would no longer live in terror of it or allow it to run my life. I knew from my own experiences and my conversations with Father Pat that faith would help me with this. My friend flemco wrote recently, "That's part of the fun of Atheism: I don't belong to a group. There is no throng of people backing up my lack of belief. We do not all meet once a week and trade stories. I am strong enough, by myself, without others or a deity, to remain resolute in my lack of belief." And I believe this to be true for him -- I've always been a little bit in awe of the guy -- but I have had to acknowledge that I am not strong enough by myself, or even with a happy marriage and good family relationships (which flemco also has).

That's all for now, and it looks like enough.

[Addendum: For any Catholics (or anyone else) who cares, my baptismal name is (of course) Joseph, and my confirmation name is Elizabeth, after a devoutly Catholic great-aunt of mine and also because it is my mother's middle name.]

Yesterday we visited a few more altars, then came home to rest. We were sitting in our living room watching basketball when we heard drumming and shouting around the corner. The Mardi Gras Indians were making their traditional St. Joseph's Night appearance. We grabbed our coats and rushed out just in time to see an exciting face-off between the Big Chiefs of the Seminoles and Young Cheyennes. I thought about running home to get my camera, but there is no way my photographs could have captured the multicolored plumes, the jewels, the intricate hand-sewn beadwork, the drumming, the trash-talking, the guys in suits and silver skull headpieces, the pride and uniqueness of this fabulous tradition that hardly anyone outside New Orleans seems to know about. There are hard, sad, and annoying things about our neighborhood, but one great thing is that we are in the heart of Uptown Indian territory (the Uptown and downtown tribes have different styles of costuming and a heady rivalry). If you've never seen a New Orleans Indian chief in full regalia, here's a great picture:



By the way, I figure people will take it for granted, but just in case not, any and all of my New Orleans-area friends and acquaintances are welcome to attend my baptism and confirmation at the Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday night. It's at 8:00 PM at Our Lady of Good Counsel, 1307 Louisiana Avenue, and there will be a reception for me in the rectory following the Mass.

Today is the real St. Joseph's Day, and some schismatics (Catholics like myself, who do not acknowledge the absolute authority of the Pope and the Vatican) are having home altars in Chalmette, Metairie, and Kenner. We're off again!

I tried to take pictures of Our Lady of Good Counsel's St. Joseph altar, but I've had very shaky hands lately, an affliction that comes upon me sometimes for no apparent reason and usually stays a couple of weeks. Here are the only three that didn't come out as blurry messes.







I'm going to go help take down the altar at 3:00. Chris is hoping I'll bring some extra cookies home, since we didn't collect as many cookie bags as usual this year.