St. Casimir's

by Dan Knauss

St. Casimir's bells ring the Angelus through the jangling, opening door of the R-evolution Cafe, where, among the donated books, Jacques Maritain takes his place alongside Herbert Marcuse. I think of the flotsam and jetsam of discarded words awaiting those who are able to receive--

A historic designation study reports the significance of St. Casimir's: "a fine example of a late Victorian Roman Catholic parish grouping that has survived nearly without alteration."

Wendell Berry, the prophet of rural America, spoke there, reading his latest novel to a multi-ethnic crowd of punks, artistes, gays, activists of every kind, and families with kids, dogs, cats. Half marijuana sodality, a crowd for back-alley cemetary matins, people given to meditating the city rooftops, storefronts turned to kinds of homes and galleries.

Was it Ginsberg who said my mind was illumined by a flash [of Grace?] through which its wish was realized?

Pour your grace into our hearts...

What grace are these people looking for? Surely not the painted statues or the place referred to by the sign, Catholics Returning Home.

To give and receive love, and to mean it and know it is meant, takes more than a life. Maybe to have it in your heart all your life in this world, even while it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.

On weekends there are often weddings or funerals--a big hearse or limo flanked by SUVs and wide cars belonging to people with some tie to this neighborhood despite their relocation to the suburbs long ago.

On odd Sundays, you must go to St. Mary of Czestochowa for mass, for lack of priests or parishioners--I'm not sure.

The wind carries down the street a peal of bells...

I am a man, who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, 'Good-good-good-good-good!' like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.

Riverwest Currents - Volume 1 - Issue 4 - May 2002