One Sunday morning in May, my mother telephoned and asked me to attend Mass with her. I was busy packing my books and deciding which ones to leave for my nephew Sam and his sisters, and I had fourteen papers on Theme in The Great Gatsby to read and mark by the end of the day. I didn’t want to go to church. But the Mass was being said in memory of Papa Vincent, my grandfather, dead these twenty years, and members of his family would be expected to bear the gifts—the little carafes of water and wine and the loot from the collections—to the altar during the Offertory Procession. My father, the sweetest soul I knew, was feeling under the weather, and my brother, a believer, was out of town. I couldn’t refuse.

My house had been sold that week to a starry-eyed couple so in love with each other that I did not feel remorse as I signed away the title to my favorite place to be in the world. My longtime love, a studio musician entrenched in the Memphis R&B scene, had tired of the long-distance romance we’d sustained since our college days. Something had to give, she’d decreed: the distance or our romance. I was surrendering my hometown eleventh-grade English teaching gig that I loved so for love.

I met Mother in the vestibule of St. Eustace, a brief stroll from both our front doors. At seventy-three, she held herself erect and still wore a dress and a hat for Mass. She squeezed my hand, and her grateful smile relieved the sting of a lost hour. We took our old places in a middle pew colored by rays of sunlight streaming through stained glass. A long scratch had been keyed into the upper ridge of the bench before us, and the jagged groove gleamed beneath its veneer of furniture polish. Looking round at the murmuring parishioners, I recalled Emerson’s “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,” and felt a kindred response. Except when challenged by certain novels or poems, I hadn’t seriously considered the question of God’s existence in years. My decades-long lapse in churchgoing may have helped me to imagine it, but something akin to mystery, to the anticipation animating a theatre before the curtain rises, permeated the consecrated air. I found myself feeling hopeful.

The parish priest was the same man who had eulogized Papa Vincent so long ago. Stuck all these years in our small Pennsylvania town’s liturgical backwater, the earnest young celibate had grown portly and bald and, more regrettably, unmelodious. Poor fellow, I thought as his congenial gaze bathed his flock, and I hung onto the Mass with him through the Kyrie Eleison, the Gloria, and the first reading: “He who believes shall not stumble.” Ah, I thought, there’s my trouble. But my empathy suffered a battering during the singing of the Responsorial Psalm: “Rest in God alone, my soul!” I stared at the phrase in the missalette. My spirit threw down its receptiveness and took up arms in the form of reproach. Rest in God alone? I damned the verse and, all at once, the Mass itself, and the embarrassment my leaving would have caused Mother was all that kept me in my seat. I grasped that the psalmist needed to pump his own veins with courage, that his exhortation was personal. But here the six words were, laid down out of context as a decree to the faithful, an imperative to rest—to trust, to believe—only in God, glorying, as I saw it, in its intolerance of any mortal-bound refuge: art, music, literature, love. I burned, sitting in our pew, and wondered if anyone else present burned or if those who would burn knew to shun the church’s portals.

Mother had to tap my shoulder to remind me to stand up for the Gospel reading.

I thought I’d wiped the fury from my face as we carried the gifts toward the altar, but when the priest reached for the collection basket I held out to him, his eyes, meeting mine, flinched. I remembered to bow my head. When the Mass ended, I still trembled.

Halfway to my parents’ house, Mother remained quiet and seemed undisturbed. The grip of my disgust had loosened, but I didn’t yet trust my voice to sound calm. Mother stopped us on the sidewalk with a touch on my arm. “Dear, what’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Just thinking about some things I’ll miss.”

“Father Hugh’s not included in your thoughts, I bet.”

I laughed. “Father Hugh, I’m sure, will not miss me.”

“You were shaking.”

I took her hand and we continued onward. “I can’t stop believing that it’s all untrue. I know you believe it is true.”

“Then you were sweet to endure it for me, it and all the clucking from my lady friends afterward.” We slowed to watch as two hummingbirds investigated a line of hollyhocks before a neighbor’s front porch. Mother looked at me and said, “Don’t you pray, Davie, ever?”

I smiled. “I do, lots.” Then I pulled Ralph Waldo out of my teacher’s hatbox again and intoned, “ ‘Prayer is the soliloquy of a beholding jubilant soul.’ That’s what you are.”

Her laughter scattered the hummingbirds. We started off again. “I’ve prepared a feast,” she said. “It’s in the oven awaiting us. Come help me lay the table for the other jubilant soul I trust you’ll miss.”

– Richard Jacobs