The Priest Who Doubted Out Loud
His honesty from the pulpit did more for my faith than certainty ever had.
Father Brennan stopped halfway through his homily on the second Sunday of Lent, looked up at the crucifix, and said, "There are mornings I wake up... and I am not sure anyone is listening." Nobody moved. Even the radiator, which had been clanking like a prisoner all through the readings, went quiet, as if it wanted to hear how this ended.
I was only there because it was the first anniversary of my mother's death, and I had promised her in the hospice that I would go to Mass for her. Once a year, I said, hedging even at a deathbed. She smiled with the half of her face that still worked and said once a year was more than she ever got out of my father, so she would take it.
So there I was in the second-to-last pew of St. Alphonsus with my coat still zipped, smelling wet wool and incense and somebody's menthol cough drops, planning my exit through the side door, when a sixty-something priest in purple vestments admitted from the pulpit that his prayers might be going nowhere.
He did not walk it back, either. That was the thing.
He let the silence sit until it hurt. Then he said, "I have been a priest for thirty-one years. I have buried children. I have anointed a woman who asked me, with one of her last real breaths, whether she would see her boy again. I told her yes. Then I sat in my car in the rectory driveway for two hours, because I did not know if I had just told a dying woman the truth."
The man in front of me shifted like his pew had caught fire. Near the front, a baby babbled, and for once nobody hushed it.
I had spent that whole year furious at exactly this kind of building. My mother believed all of it: the rosary, the novenas, the holy water in a plastic bottle shaped like the Virgin Mary that she kept in the glove compartment next to the parking tickets.
None of it saved her.
And the priest who did her funeral, some visiting monsignor with a voice like a recorded message, spoke about her as if he were reading off an index card. Margaret was a devoted wife and mother. Margaret loved her parish.
My mother hated being called Margaret. She was Peg. She swore at crossword puzzles. She once threw a slipper at the television during a hurling match, hit my father instead, and laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor.
So when a priest finally stood up and told the truth, which is that sometimes the line goes dead and you keep talking anyway... something in my chest unclenched for the first time in twelve months.
He finished the homily with no answer at all... He just said he still shows up. "I do not stand here because I am certain," he said. "I stand here because of what I have learned about heavy things."
Doubt gets heavy, and heavy things are meant to be carried by more than one person.
After Mass there was tea in the parish hall, the kind of tea that tastes like the urn it came from, and I stayed, which surprised me more than anything the priest had said. I waited behind two women who were telling him, in the gentlest possible way, that they would be writing to the bishop about the homily. He thanked them and said the bishop's address was printed in the bulletin. When they left, I stuck out my hand and could not think of a single word to put with it.
"You're Peg Doyle's," he said.
I asked how he knew. He said I had her habit of standing side-on, like I was ready to leave, and that he had seen her anniversary listed in the bulletin that morning. Then he poured me a tea I did not want and asked me to sit, and because he had already spent the morning saying things priests are not supposed to say, I sat.
We talked for a while about nothing, the roof fund, the frost, the price of heating a building with forty-foot ceilings. Then I asked him, because I had to, whether the story in the homily was true... The woman. The question about her boy.
"It was your mother," he said.
He said it plainly, the way you hand someone a cup you are afraid of dropping. He had covered chaplaincy at the hospice the week the regular man was away.
My mother had asked him whether she would see her boy again, and he had said yes, and she had meant my brother Danny, who went into the river with three friends the summer he was nineteen and came out three days later... alone, downstream, while the whole town searched the wrong bank.
I had not heard anyone outside the family say Danny's name in years. We were good at that, my family. We kept his photograph on the hall table and walked past it a little faster every year. My mother prayed for him every night, out loud, and my father would leave the room, and I learned to be somewhere else at nine o'clock. That was our system. It ran for decades without anyone ever naming it.
"She was not afraid," Father Brennan told me. "She only wanted a yes from a professional. I gave it to her. And I have been arguing with myself about it ever since. That is why I said it today. Some doubts you have to say in a full room, or they eat you in an empty one."
I cried in a parish hall over urn tea, is what happened.
A woman stacking chairs pretended, heroically, not to see.
Something shifted after that. Not faith, exactly. I did not walk out of St. Alphonsus believing. But that winter I started writing at night, badly at first, and for the first time in my life I wrote about the grief instead of around it. I wrote about Danny's photograph on the hall table. I wrote about a plastic Virgin full of holy water riding around a glove compartment next to the parking tickets. And one poem came out that was not about loss at all, a small stubborn thing about hope, the kind you keep like a dry match in a coat pocket, and on a dare from myself I entered it into a monthly poetry contest. It did not win. It did not have to. The point was the sending.
I keep my once-a-year promise now, except I go more than once. Not every week. I sit in the second-to-last pew and I could not tell you exactly what I believe, and I have finally stopped auditing myself about it. Father Brennan preaches certainty some Sundays and uncertainty on others, and as far as I can tell the church has gotten fuller, not emptier. The two letter-writing women still come. One of them runs the roof fund with him now. Nobody mentions the bishop.
Last month I stayed behind after Mass and lit two candles at the side altar, where the rack hisses and the coin box accepts euros and buttons with equal grace. One for Peg. One for a priest who told a dying woman yes and then stayed honest enough to wonder about it for the rest of his life. The two small flames leaned toward each other in the draft from the side door, the same door I once planned my escape through, and I stood in the dark and watched until they steadied, listening to a quiet that no longer felt like no one answering.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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