The job in the box, is not that far from Scarred Heart Elementary School. I went to school there and got beat up by the teachers, the nuns and lay teachers alike. It's hardly a shocking story - it's a very common one, and nothing compared to the stories of sexual abuse now coming out of such places from people close to me in age. So, tossing a kid, desk and all into a wall, or hitting her or kicking her, well, that's nothing. Nobody killed me and stuffed me into the trash. And there are plenty of people with similar stories who say it was good for them. "Straightend me right out."

You can walk there from the office, and I have done so, on my lunch hour. I have walked the parking lot around the school, backwards of the way I ever walked it in the course of my normal activities there, so that I will not suddenly fall back in time in memory and forget myself.

The place, of course, has changed a great deal. It always had that look of a campus, of a Catholic Compound, self sufficient and central as churches used to be in the Middle Ages. Now it's me that's middle aged....and so once again my perspective on the place and what happened there seems to be changing.

My first instinct, true to my soul, when the physical abuse happened was to deeply forget it. To say it didn't happen. It was too much to deal with: the idea that I was so evil I had driven the good women of that place insane with my wickedness and caused them to break the peace of the Lord by behaving violently. Well, I didn't always think that. The first woman, the woman who may have injured my back, was already seriously mentally ill at the time she did it. I'm pretty sure I knew it at the time. I had the sense that she wasn't in control of herself, that she had no idea what else to do in her pain and distress than act out in ways similar to the ways in which she herself had been abused. She could tell some tales! She was only making children push pennies along the floor with their noses are making the boys dress in girls' clothes when they misbehaved, not throwing anybody backwards over a rod at the front of the room and beating them senseless, the way her teachers had done. Times had changed and we didn't know how good we had it! The poor woman. I hope she got help at some point, because my fear of her was always tempered by pity, even at the time.

Well. Anyway. Then I tried to pretend that, while it happened, it didn't really happen to ME. That it had nothing to do with the person that I was. It was just an unfortunate series of events, far in the past, ancient history...at a time when it was much close to my "present" than it is now. Counselors suggested that I confront the church, the school, or some reprentative thereof so I could "be heard". The thing I was most aware of was this: nobody wants to hear it, and I don't want to keep going over and over it again. So no more organ music, no more mass, no more insense burning. God is big and he can hear my prayer as well in a Quaker meeting as he can from a pew. And part of the reason why I was so excited about moving to MA was that I knew that I wouldn't have to travel up and down Bad Memory Lane and have my hands start shaking unexpectedly whenever I passed the place.

So, okay, maybe I wasn't doing all that great a job of "putting it all behind me". But then stuff happened that was so much worse it really DID make Scarred Heart look like a picnic. And those aren't stories nobody else has to tell either. More of the aweful stuff that happens to women: " a common tale, but true". So surely, I am over it. Surely the church, the school, the buildings hold no power over me now.

After all, things are so different! A whole new church has been built where the girls' side of the playground was ( boys and girls were not allowed to mingle at recess past the 1st grade)so mass, I understand, is no longer said while the congregation sits on folding chairs in the part of the school building that was supposed to be the gymn. And, perhaps most tellingly about the state of the Catholic church, there is a sign up that says: "There are still openings for the 2005-06 school year."

See that? Spare the rod, spoil the waiting list.

The convent is where the kindergarten used to be. They built an addition on to the old convent and turned that into the parish center. You have to be buzzed in or enter a number on a keypad to enter the parish center - I observed this from the parking lot. Very warm. All are welcome.

But the place that drew me the most was the place that always drew me the most there. The little stone chapel, which was built in the 1700s. Lots of the kids were kind of creeped out by it. They wouldn't go near it, didn't like it. Of course it would not be open. It wasn't left open in the days I was a child there, since by then There Were Drugs, and people would come in and steal money out of the poor box.

Except that yesterday it was open. The door, I could see, had not latched. This struck me as an oversight. So, cautiously, I did go in. The historic structure had also changed. Air conditioning had been installed - it was cool as well as dark, but there was plenty of light coming in through the old stained glass windows. There had been renovations, but not not updates. In general the place looked better, less shabby, even though the alter flowers were dying. I went in cautiously, and genuflected at the first pew, unsteadily, but faithfully. I somehow picked up the habits of much older Catholics even though my "indoctrination" was post Vatacin II.

When I looked up at the alter, my heart leapt. The light had been moved forward, and I realized it was that light I had come to see. I ought to explain this point. I'm talking about the sanctuary light. I learned, as a child, that this candle is a symbol of the presence of Christ in the church, and it is never allowed to go out. Thus, it is literally true that a candle has been burning on the alter in that church for over 200 years. Because the little church is not in regular use any more, I was not sure if it would be there. But, not only was it there, it had been moved to a more prominent place and a larger lantern, still in keeping with the historical elements of the church, was now housing it.

Unable to immediately rise from one knee anyhow, I remained there gazing at it. It's hard to explain the affect it had on me. We used to use this little church for "class mass" - events that were relevant to the members of our grade in school. At school, we kept the liturgical calender the way it had been kept pre-Vatican II. We went to mass on all the holy days of obligation, on the first Friday of every month, every Friday during lent, etc. But class masses celebrated other events - they were part of our education as we wound our way through communion and confession on through confirmation. There was a whole lot of church going on!

Naturally, I'd spend a lot of time during these masses trying to sort out what was going on around me. If Jesus said to turn the other cheek, why couldn't my teachers get through the day without slapping somebody, who had done them no harm at all? I was willing to own the fact of my own wickedness, but I could see very clearly that many of the other "targets" of such violence committed no more serious crimes than being too poor, too exuberent, or too slow to catch on. The actions weren't matching up with the words, or the words were being taken out of context....after all, the Gospel was being read out loud in full passages at least once a month.

Maybe that was what made our teachers so bitter against the reforms brought about by Good Pope John: we didn't have to understand Latin for their authority to be undermined. And undermined it was, at least for me. I became sure that Christ, whoever that was, as hard as it was for me to comprehend Him, did not condone all the screaming and beating and throwing of chalk and textbooks, and favoritism that prevaded the school. Christ was somewhere else beyond the suffering crusafix: he was risen after all. And when I looked for Him, when I prayed to him, I focused on the warm and constant light of the Candle Which Never Went Out.

This is a firm belief I have: that,for some reason, He saved me from the confusion that befell so many other people in my situation. Unlike many others, I never confused the violence done to me by members of the church with anything having to do with God. It was to Him I prayed for mercy. I trusted him to know my heart - to know that, although I hadn't done my homework for the fourty millionth time I wasn't lying when I said it was because my head hurt. I wasn't just making it up when I said I couldn't read the blackboard. Yes, I did harbor unkind thoughts against my little brother, but I was wracked with grief and horror that I'd thrown a toy him in my anger. Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy, was my constant prayer. And then the Gospel would be read out, and in it were endless stories of God's mercy and his love. Jesus reached out to fallen women, tax collectors, Roman soldiers like the ones who would eventually kill him ("Only say the word and I shall be healed"), the rich, the poor, the sick, the old, and the children. The only people he seemed to be at odds with were the ones who were sure they knew everything, the authorities of the faith of His time...who seemed a lot like the confused Miss S. and the arrogant Sr. L. But he didn't overcome them with violence. He overcame them with love. And I felt a powerful, powerful calling in my youth to turn away from violence and anger of any kind to go towards the gentleness that was in my nature. I felt that this lamp had been lit in my heart and the darkness would never put it out, because it didn't come from me, but from Above.

So now here I am. There I was. No longer a thin and nearsighted eight year old, but a tall sharp 38 year old, kneeling in the church where I had knelt hundreds of times, with my hand resting upon a pew where it had rested hundreds of times before. I had been through the church, and left the church, through counselling, through medical treatments for my back. I had moved 500 miles away from The Land That Time Forgot, from Bad Memory Lane, and from Scarred Heart, only to come back again to have the rounds of my daily life include all those places once more. And, in all that time, The Candle Which Never Goes Out had never gone out. It had burned steadily in that little church, in spite of everything that people had done.

I wondered, and still wonder what it meant. On one hand, it means nothing. Of course the candle is still there. It is a functioning Catholic church, the candle is a tradition that has survived since time out of mind. All of the symbols of the church - it was ALWAYS part of the teaching I received - were only outward signs of inward or greater truths...something for our poor senses to hold on to to steady us in this Veil of Tears. So it was a candle, and if I had a mind to I could have put it out.

On the other hand, I could not help but feel as if the merciful Light of Christ had been waiting for me, all that time, as if His hand which is very light and subtle in the world, held open the door a fraction of a second behind the person who left it unlatched. As if He wanted me to see "I am still here in this faith tradition, the one in which you came to know Me. I am over and above all of this, the keypads and the locks, the same as I ever was, and you can still find Me here."