Innocence

Summer Block

August 25, 2008

Often I catch one of the pre-K children stopping in front of the long mirrors along the chapel walls.  He has been walking very ably and then he stops.  He stops and stares and sits down in the dirt, remembering who he is.

August 28, 2008

I found Julian sitting this morning in the scrubby strip of dirt where the pansies died, behind the water heater.  He was hiding from me, but he purposefully stuck one of his bright purple sneakers out for me to see as I walked by.  I ordered him to go immediately to the small chapel for the children’s service – today is the feast day of St. Monica, the blessed mother of St. Augustine., who followed her son all the way to Rome to find him already gone.

September 1, 2008

Julian’s father came to pick him up today; he left work early to take Julian to a children’s concert downtown.  Julian was throwing a tantrum right as his father appeared, swinging an orange plastic pail by its broken handle.  Caitlin had accidentally broken the pail on the sandbox rail, and I had told Julian that it could not be fixed.  His father knelt down in front of Julian and looking into his tear-smeared face, said to me over his shoulder, “Can’t you maybe glue the pail?”

He didn’t turn around, he wanted Julian to know whose side he was on.

“He hates other children in the sandbox,” I said while we waited for Sister Magdalena to pack up his things.

“No, he’s just over-tired,” he said confidently and not sweetly, “he’s only two, he hasn’t learned to hate.”

Waving around the broken pail, Julian is hearing “no” like Adam heard the Lord’s voice in the Garden.  Anyone who has spent time with the youngest babies in the daycare has seen the changing terrors on their faces.  It’s the most elemental sin, that separation from goodness and comfort.  A crying baby is raging, impotent, mad helpless with need.   If it weren’t for sin, who would make a sound?

“I’ll get you another pail,” Julian’s father said to Sister Magdalena without looking at me.

“The weakness then of infant limbs,” as the Blessed Augustine said, “not its will, is its innocence.”

Julian’s parents love him instead of knowing him.  I love him because I do know him.  Like God loves me.

September 9, 2008

Another sister has moved into the room where Sister Maria Helena used to live.  Her name is Sister Dolores, she was transferred up here from San Diego for the Mission work.  She told me her old name was Adelita, “Like ‘La Adelita,’” she said, but I didn’t know what that meant.

“It’s an old song,” she said simply.

She rarely speaks; I don’t think she speaks English very well.  Soon Spanish will be the only language spoken at the convent.  I should learn Spanish, I know, to help with our work, but I’m too old to learn a new language.  I’ll just keep speaking English to fewer and fewer people, until eventually the Lord gives me my own vow of silence, and no one will be left here to understand me but Him.

I don’t have any problem with Latin Americans, God loves all His people the same.  But I worry when I see the faith recede to the ends of the world, all those new converts like the whirl in the last dregs of bath water before it runs down the drain.  The last time we took the center van down to the Mission, we passed rows and rows of stores and Spanish signs, and sidewalk vendors selling plastic dolls for the Blessed Virgin and Pope John Paul II.  It looked primitive and impure – something dirty and small and local, like the street carts on Figueroa buckling with guava and sugar cane.  It didn’t look convincing, it didn’t look like something that could change anyone’s mind.

September 15, 2008

Now that Sister Dolores is here to take charge of our work with the Mission, I no longer have to make that trip in the van every Wednesday, to feed the homeless on Skid Row.  Instead, I will work full-time in the daycare center.  A second full-price preschool class is starting—this one not for those who cannot afford to pay for daycare, but for wealthier families, to support the convent.  Daycare is hard to find in Los Angeles, and families from as far away as Hollywood drive their young children here before they go to work in the morning.

Many of the children are Latin American now, but the group is still mixed.  Their parents are for the most part not Catholics, or not practicing ones—they are people who need good, safe daycare and want to teach their children “values.”  As though values existed separately from God.  They treat His Revealing like a buffet where you can pick and choose: I’ll take hope, kindness, and chastity, but I’d rather not say the rosary, I’d rather not drink His blood.  I want a child who is good but all alone, who has no one to bolster his courage, who has no place to pour his love.

September 29, 2008

This morning I got a call from Julian’s parents.  They wanted to tell me that Julian would be out sick today, nothing serious, but his mother sounded worried.  She is one of the few mothers who is not Mexican.  I assume she is American, but she has a strange, foreign way of speaking, as though she’s scared to hear the sound of her voice here.  She’s afraid I’ll convert her son, or her, or maybe that she will get in trouble for something.  She snatches Julian up at the end of each day and almost runs for the door, her eyes down, past the images of the Blessed Virgin and her Son.

Julian is two years old, and he doesn’t know a nun from anyone else.  He smiles at me every morning with his wide-open face, and watches me all day from his deep, still eyes, as I put the infants down for their naps or set out the older children’s art supplies.  We pray together with the rest of the pre-K class in the garden under the brick alcove, and though the youngest are too young to speak, Julian becomes still and clear and calm.  Father Alonso came once and laid his hands on him and the other pre-K children for St. Monica’s Day, and Julian went as still as a waiting animal.  He didn’t even flinch when Father Alonso accidentally caught his hair with his watch band.

Julian is wise and quiet, he is hard to get to know.  When he sleeps on his cot by the sink, he looks fat and smooth-skinned and innocent like the angel figurines Sister Dolores keeps on the shelf above her bed. So fragile, hopeful and inadequate: an angel that appears, not in fire and in fury, but on a candy pink cloud, a baby with pigeon’s wings.

Why would anyone wish for innocence?  Where is the wisdom in ignorance of sin?  Ignorance cannot lead to redemption.  Julian already is wise enough to know this.  Children are wicked, but Jesus will save them. Not because they are innocent, but because they are forgiven.

October 6, 2008

Today Julian was calling from the bathroom.  He knows how to use the toilet, but sometimes he needs help.  He doesn’t forget how—he remembers that he used to not know how, and the gap between who he was and who he is now frightens him.  Then he sits stock-still on the little plastic toilet in the pre-K bathroom crying at the passing time, frightened of this new self.

I went in there today and knelt by him.  I wouldn’t wipe him or put on his pants; he knows how to do those things himself.  I told him he was a big boy, and he knew that already, that’s why he was crying.

While he was pulling his pants back on, I noticed a strange patch of skin low on his back, beneath his waistband.

October 7, 2008

Today Julian was irritable.  He wouldn’t sleep; he wouldn’t eat.  He wet his clothes and had to wear pants from the spare set his parents left in his cubby on the first day of school.  The other children sensed he was set apart and they wouldn’t go near him—young children abandon the weak like gazelles, or else they zero in like lions.

While I was changing his pants, I had a chance to examine the patch on his lower back more carefully.  The skin there was almost the same pale even color, only slightly pinker, but rough and knobby, like a fruit peel, like something native and unclean rising up from beneath his skin.  I should tell his parents.  I could have told his mother when she came to pick him up at school today, but she just rushed off without making eye contact with me, Jesus, or the Virgin, without even seeing Julian, she was so eager to leave.

Didn’t Augustine himself write to St. Jerome, “But when we come to the penal sufferings of infants, I am embarrassed, believe me, by great difficulties, and am wholly at a loss to find an answer by which they are solved.”

October 8, 2008

Sister Dolores asked for permission to take the mothers of young children at the Mission on a trip up to Santa Paula Canyon to get out of the heat and the city.  I was asked to accompany her and the Mission mothers on a bus we borrowed from St. Mark’s in Alhambra and Sister Magdalena was left to take care of the pre-K and the nursery.  On the way we stopped for lunch and Sister Dolores spoke in Spanish with the grandmother that owned the restaurant about her grown children, nodding sympathetically with that pinched, dry look around her jaw, a face that makes her look old already.

She is a thirty-year-old woman, and a nun, and still she thinks a mother’s love is a miracle.  The love of art, the love of country, the love of your neighbors, of your enemies, the love of Him: those are God’s miracles, miracles of patience and contemplation.  Sister Dolores believes in the miracle of the love a mother feels when for the first time she sets eyes on her infant’s face.  The low, animal love a cat feels for its kittens: automatic, unearned, easy.  Well, she is still young.

October 10, 2008

The fruit-peel patch is still on his skin. It seems impossible his mother hasn’t noticed it. She notices everything—she once called Sister Helena because Julian brought home carrot sticks in his pockets, and she knew she hadn’t given him carrots for lunch.  She sews tags into all his clothing, and labels every thing he owns like she is preparing him for a lifetime of owning things.  Or perhaps she has noticed the patch, but she hasn’t told the school.  That would be irresponsible and dangerous, introducing a sick child here with all the infants and the other pre-K children spreading germs.  I should mention it to her the next time I see her.

She thinks I don’t love him as she does, because I never carried him in my body.  Well, the body is a passing thing.

October 15, 2008

This morning I approached Sister Dolores on her way back from the morning services.  She had her head tucked down into her collar as though she were cold, even though it was only 65 downtown today.  Maybe it is always warmer in San Diego.

“Sister Dolores,” I asked her, slowly, so she could understand me.  “May I use your computer in the Mission office? I need to research something.”

I could tell she was curious—the convent permits the sisters to use the internet for whatever good purposes we desire, but we rarely do, especially me, at seventy-one.

“Of course, Sister.  I will be going there this afternoon, if you would like to ride in the van.”

Usually I cannot leave the daycare center during the day, but one of our novices agreed to watch over the pre-K and infant groups for me.  I took the van with Sister Dolores up to the Mission office, and Sister Dolores showed me how to sign in, how to look things up on Google.  I have used the computer once or twice before, when we were adding the new daycare families to our mailing list, and I was impatient with her too-slow explanations, but I bit my tongue.  She is a good person, I told myself, she just doesn’t know what it is like to be old.  God willing she has a lifetime to learn.

Once she had left, I typed in “two-year-old male child with a rough patch of skin on his back.”

It took a long time to find something that looked right.

“Tuberous sclerosis (TSC) is a rare genetic disease that causes benign tumors to grow in the brain and on other vital organs such as the kidneys, heart, eyes, lungs, and skin.  In addition to the benign tumors that frequently occur in TSC, other common symptoms include seizures, mental retardation, behavior problems, and skin abnormalities.  Seizures, infections, or tumors in vital organs such as the kidneys and brain can lead to severe complications and even death.”

I wished I had asked Sister Dolores how to print a paper copy of the web page, but instead I wrote all the information down carefully, even the very technical parts that I didn’t completely understand.

I know there is a way to wipe away a computer’s memory, like married men do to hide from their wives the things they find on the internet, but I didn’t know how.  Instead, I searched a few more things to clear it out.  I didn’t search things at random—to do so would have been lying—so I tried to think of things I really wanted to know.  New games for the children, the lyrics to children’s songs.  Before I logged off, I searched for “Saint Monica,” and let it rest awhile on the screen, like a blessing.

October 16, 2008

I know he is not retarded; I’ve had children who were retarded.  I imagine him stuck forever right where he is now, still crying on the plastic toilet, one of God’s fools.  But he is not retarded, though he may be sick.   The scaly patch is the same, clearly visible every time he goes to the toilet or changes his clothes.  How can she not have noticed?  Or is she intentionally keeping it from us at the convent?  Tuberous sclerosis is not contagious, the internet said, but it may be some other thing.  He would need to be in a hospital, he would need to be taken away from me.  If he is dying, there is nothing that can make him well but Him here.  During nap time I wanted to lay hands on him, but this is a sin of pride—I am a nun; I don’t hold the sacraments in my hands like Father Alonso.  So instead, I pray from afar for my son.

October 17, 2008

Julian’s mother was thirty minutes late to pick him up today.  Usually, we charge a fee to late parents, because we have to keep the paid staff longer, the receptionist and janitor and Hector, who helps with the older children.  She came in embarrassed and apologetic; I know she can afford the fee, she just didn’t want to be in trouble with the nuns.  Though Julian’s mother was never raised in the Church, never went to Catholic school, she has heard about the frightening Catholic School nun.  To the Mexican mothers, the ones who grew up with nuns, we are just a part of life.  To this modern American woman, I am like a specter from the Middle Ages, a living folktale.  I can tell she fears and despises me; I can picture her at home at night with her Jewish husband, trying to find a new, secular daycare center on the internet.  She knows that at school each day Julian is mine; that evenings are only the scraps of his time.

I also know that Julian is dying.  That patch on his skin told me from the first day I saw it, when he was crying on the toilet.  Perhaps that’s why he was crying, perhaps he knows it, too.  I would never betray him by speaking about this thing.  There is nothing his mother can do for him, but there is something I can do for him.  After they left today, I went down to the chapel beside the kitchen and knelt down for him and prayed.

October 19, 2008

Julian’s face when he is sleeping is clean and patient as a lamb.  Maybe he only lives in sin when he is awake; when he is asleep, he is closer to the God he left behind to come to me here on earth, at the convent.  It was wrong of me to take him here, to this dirty, rushing place.  I pray that God will help me find a way to send my son back home to heaven where I’ll follow him someday, much farther even than Rome.

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