Lately, I have felt as if I live in two centuries, the 19th and the 21st. I’ve been writing a short narrative about the Catholic community where I grew up. The gathering point was a white country church, much like the country church stereotypes. I was baptized there and made my first communion there too. I remember a brick building across the road that, before I was born, had been a one-room schoolhouse. The general store and post office were gone before my birth. There is nothing left on that country corner now but a cemetery.
As
I have looked at pictures and researched the history, I have felt at times like
I’m part of that community that built the church in 1888. There is a certain wonder about the past and
how it constructs our present. In the
last 300 years, that space was (1) barely settled farm land, (2) a community of
Irish immigrants farming the land, (3) and now, a community with a large
population of Amish farmers and craftsmen and not enough Catholics to maintain
the church. Last week, when I was
visiting there, I felt a part of it all.
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