High School Limbo
Monday, May 21st, 2007Growing up Catholic, there were rules, and there were mysteries. Rules were things like Thou Shall Not Have Impure Thoughts. For the majority of the seventh grade, this was no easy task.
“But Sister,” one of my classmates wondered aloud, “what if you can’t help it? Is it still a sin?”
“Yes!” Sister Antonia barked. “A rule is a rule. If you break it, it’s a sin. And the only way to remove the sin is to go to confession and make a good Act of Contrition.”
Mysteries were something else. If Sister Antonia didn’t have a good explanation for something, the answer always was, “It’s a mystery.”
Take baptism. The rule said that only people who were baptized could get into heaven.
“But Sister,” we queried, “What happens if a two week old baby is dies? And, and the parents didn’t get the baby baptized yet? And, and you know, a baby can’t commit a sin, right Sister? But the baby can’t go to heaven ’cause it’s not baptized, right? Does the baby go to hell? Cause it’s not the baby’s fault it wasn’t baptized. So, where does the baby go, Sister?”
“We-e-ell,” Sister Antonia drawled through her thick rimless glasses, “that, children, is a mystery. God has a special place called Limbo for those babies.”
Limbo was a fuzzy place somewhere between heaven and hell. It was a nice enough place, but you didn’t make it to heaven. And you didn’t get to see God. Only people in heaven got to see God. So you just kind of floated around ad infinitum with all the other unbaptized babies.
The eighteen-year-old has been in high school limbo since last Friday. He finished semester exams, but the graduation ceremony and diploma don’t happen until this Thursday. So he’s designated this period as a sacred holding pattern during which he should have no obligations. No alarm. No curfew. No chores. No summer job search.
Jack Daniels and I conferred late into the evening. I emerged primed to engage the mind and will of an eighteen-year-old son in limbo with that of a fifty-one-year-old menopausal mother.
Parenting has its rules and its mysteries. I’m negotiating these next few days with both. Sister Antonia would be proud.