Whitewashed Tombs

Last night, I returned to church, thinking that the first day of Lent would be a good time for it, but a funny thing happened. I became my father.

Even funnier? It is nothing like I imagined it would be.

On a Saturday night in the 1970s, my mother, father, brother, sister, and I walked out of the cavernous, ugly, wood panelled, Vatican-II aberration labeled St. Martin of Tours Church, and while my mom, siblings, and I were getting in the car, my father was shaking the dust off his feet. The Roman Catholic Church, that had been a part of his entire life, had turned the lights out on him—literally—and from the tiny glow of match after match that he struck there in the pew, he discovered that he was sitting in a whitewashed tomb.

The darkness descended on me last night in St. Francis Xavier Church, where I was surrounded by masked zombies and struggled to hear the masked mumblings of a pusillanimous priest. Of course, being Bert Doyle’s daughter, I raged against the dying of the light from the steps outside the church: “When will you stop living in fear? When will you all take off your masks? When will you stop believing the lies? When will you stop treating human beings like they’re nothing more than disease vectors? When will you treat each other like human beings again?”

People turned and stared, but only one woman dared to confront me. From behind her mask, a white-haired woman told me to shut up. She told me she was a nurse and that people were dying. I replied, “Yes, they are, from the vaccines. The last time I checked VAERS, we were up to more than 20,000 deaths from those poisons.”

“That’s a lie,” she hissed. “I’m a nurse.” Of course she is. There are few segments of the population more indoctrinated by propaganda than doctors and nurses. But I digress.

It turns out that I am in no-man’s land, and it’s strange. All I seem to have left is the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

But here’s the weirdest part: Today, I am spiritually richer than ever before. That 1970s church was not the only whitewashed tomb from Millinocket.