Several years after leaving religious life and returning to the “world,” I traversed northwest on the planet from Chicago to visit family in the Twin Cities.  I desired to spend some time with my grandmother, and a Sunday morning found the two of us heading to church together.  My Grandmother was an original … with her original teeth … original hips … practicing an original religion. She embraced the formalized formulas of faith on her own terms—with her own terms.  I remembered her innovative rendition of the Apostles’ Creed was less heady than the approved version and provided a window into her mind and heart.  It captured my imagination with its ironical, nifty ideas.  

We walked up to an aged, blended Romanesque, Byzantine, and something-else-I-couldn’t-put-my-finger-on, Roman Catholic Church called Epiphany on a brilliantly blue skied, bitingly cold, Minnesota morning.

I was an invisible man to the two elderly women standing behind me as I pulled open the heavy bronze door of the church to admit them in. They clutched each other for physical support from the blasting, icy wind.

“If your lips are dry, you are in the first stage of dehydration,” the one murmured to the other.

I unconsciously swiped my upper lip with my tongue. My lip was dry. What was the “second stage”?

As I  held the door open to let the women pass inside, one, or both, smelled like lilac talcum powder. Intense.

I was not acknowledged. Did they think church doors opened by magic?

Propping a foot against the door, I cautiously guided my eighty-four-year-old grandmother slowly across the threshold into this house of worship called Epiphany.

This was my grandmother’s church, not mine. The church of my youth didn’t have corners.  It was one of those contemporary, copy-cat “theater-in-the-round” models in the suburbs. The grandiosity we were entering was imbued with marble and timeless manners (artistic detailing out the wazoo) that spoke legacy and stability.  Its only vulnerability was dwindling attendance.

On rare occasions as a youngster, I would spend the weekend with her and we would walk to Sunday Mass—a quick, two-block stroll. We would pass another Catholic church on the way.

“That’s the Irish church,” she once said dismissively. We were not Irish. Epiphany was a German church. We were not German. Yes, confusing. Memorable.

Now on our way into Epiphany, I asked, “Grandma, do my lips look dry?” I aimed my lips in her direction.

“Your lips! There’s nothing the matter with you!”

The heavy brass door slowly, silently closed behind us on its own—with the weight of its convictions.

“God almighty, it’s dark in here!” I said.

“You’ll get used to it,” she replied indifferently.

The narthex—or, in secular language, lobby—of the church had a startling interior and the ambiance of a mausoleum. Heavy with dark, cold marble, it was windowless and deadly silent. It is intimidating to challenge the authority of marble. Darkness, like death, is the great equalizer—acne-faced teens were indistinguishable from sun-spotted seniors in this interior.

The architectural elements of a church often weave religious meaning into their general what-it-all-means context. I probed for the character of the mausoleum lobby … Life is short? The connection between faith and death? What happens in the lobby stays in the lobby?

Unimportant things seemed to fall away in this space—making an echoing clank as they hit the stone floor.

I tried to focus on the Holy Water font I knew used to be just inside the door to the left. “There he is,” I said to myself as my eyes adjusted to the gloomy atmosphere. I found “him”—a shoulder-high pedestal of a frozen-in-marble, sorrowful-looking angel holding a marble bowl. The only light of day he ever saw was when someone opened the door.

Unlike a majority of parishioners, my grandmother did not have a “family pew.” She transmigrated weekly.  She always settled on the right pew for her after giving the space a thorough review.

“Where would you like to sit today, Grandma?” I asked.

She lifted her head, squinted and scrutinized the massive church.

“Well … Not up there with those old people.”  

I scanned the church looking for the “old people.”  Upon finding a small cluster of elderly women up front to the right, I smiled as I quickly surmised that they were younger than my grandmother.  

I wondered if humans ever in their life span see themselves as they really are.  (Yes, perhaps too scary.)  Carl Jung said only a small minority did.  Most need feedback from others to know their true nature.  But how receptive are the receivers?  How perceptive are the perceivers?”

People have a selective attention system and perceptions are heavily influenced by accumulated expectations and engraved former experiences.

One sees what one wants to see—or not see.  One chooses what one wants to feel—or not feel.