Temples of the Holy Ghost

            The child was in for a long weekend.  Two older cousins had come to stay on a brief leave from their convent school.  They arrived in their brown convent uniforms but were no sooner in the house than they took them off and put on red skirts, loud blouses, lipstick and high heels and walked around, “always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs.”  They also put on airs, being fourteen years old.   But the younger child was unimpressed.  She thought they were ugly and skinny.  Her mother was at a loss as to how to entertain them; she knew no boys their age.  The mischievous child suggested they invite Alonzo, the eighteen-year-old driver who delivered the girls from school.  Alonzo was a stout fellow who “chewed short black cigars and had a round, sweaty chest that showed through the yellow nylon shirt he wore.”  The girls screamed in protest. 

            Then the cousins set about washing their hair and putting it up in curlers and calling each other Temple One and Temple Two amid a gale of giggles.  When asked to explain, they told the child’s mother how Sister Perpetua had given them a lecture on what to do (and here there were more giggles) if a young man should “behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile.  Sister Perpetua said they were to say, ‘Stop, sir!  I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!’”  And they laughed uncontrollably.

            The child, who was a belligerent Catholic, living as she did in a southern town of the 1950’s where Catholics were few and therefore serious about their identity and values, “sat up off the floor with a blank face.  She didn’t see anything so funny in this.”  Nor did her mother.  “After all,” said she, “that’s what you are – Temples of the Holy Ghost.”  I find that line such a refreshing reaction to the giddiness of the cousins in Flannery O’Connor’s tale “Temples of the Holy Ghost”.  I mean, we’ve lived for so long in a modern world whose favorite refrain seems to be: It ain’t necessarily so; the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible; it ain’t necessarily so.  

            We live in an environment that finds it ridiculous to accept as fact anything that’s not scientifically verifiable; an intellectual climate that winces at any notion we could possibly be the products of a personal Creator or have immortal souls.  And so we waver.  We concede that many of the particulars of our faith tradition may not be “necessarily so”. 

            But not that Southern Catholic mother!  She seems to realize that if we concede everything, then all we’re left with are tons of verifiable information about nature and the stars and biology and evolution that tell us nothing about what we really want to know – like who we are and what speaks to us from beyond death.  To her all such information is so much amusing hypothesis compared to the “facts” our souls crave to hear: that we are indeed Temples of the Holy Ghost and that all Nature is nothing less than an astounding sacrament, reflective of the Creator who authored us and guides both us and our children toward an unfathomable destiny. The Bible contains many episodes such as today’s passage from Matthew that describe the miraculous nourishment of people who were starving to death.  Their intent includes a reminder that the Church, despite its failings, remains the keeper of a miraculous cupboard that contains the only truths that can satisfy our insatiable souls.

Printed with  permission: Living the Lectionary by Geoff Wood; Liturgical Training Publications, Archdiocese of Chicago; 2003.