Remembrance: St. Raphael Church
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My great grandparents, Edward and Katherine Stanton, helped to secure the land for St. Raphael Church; my grandparents, Robert and Eleanor Stanton, donated desks to the school. My family was a part of a larger family that dreamed about this institution in Bay Village, Ohio, much as parents anticipate the birth of a baby and look forward with equal parts joy and trepidation in raising it to maturity.
My father and my uncles served as altar boys, flung themselves off of the bygone merry-go-round on the playground behind the school. In his eighth grade year, my father faced his father's coffin, the words of Father Zwilling still echo in his head, trying to offer a young man comfort on a day that brought so much pain.
My parents moved us back to Bay Village in my sixth year. I launched into first grade mid-semester, sporting the polyester pleats, sitting at a too-big desk in the same building where my father and his brothers made mischief just beyond the gaze of Sr. Concetta and Sr. Mary John. My father still praises the nuns and lay teachers whose longsuffering, underpaid service taught hundreds of thousands of children to read and write and genuflect before a Cross.
In that building and in the shadows of its mellow orange brick, it seems I learned all the things that I could ever learn in a lifetime: how to circumnavigate a bully, how to shoot a basketball, how to comfort a friend whose parents were divorcing, how to play four-square.
I learned in that church how to marvel at Jesus, His sacrifice. The most anguish-inducing Crucifix hung at the front of St. Raphael's. No punches have been pulled from the suffering on the Cross and it was at a young and impressionable age that this imprint was made on my heart, that sin was responsible for all of that, and that I was a part of it. I pondered this and went back to singing "Color the world with gladness/color the world with joy..." reading lyrics off a pastel song sheet, sitting elbow to elbow, packed like sardines into school mass during Lent.
I made my first communion in that church, I confessed to treating my sister terribly, I confirmed that I wanted to become a Catholic for life. My mother met her husband there; they were married in the convent chapel with their families all around.
The summer after I graduated from high school, my sister and I were in a musical of "Godspell" that our youth ministry performed in that church. My counterparts have gone on to earn Tony nominations and write plays and edit comic books for major publishers. But at the time, we were all still a ball of hormones and wobbling voices and we loved every moment together. We encountered discipleship there in the pews where we practiced and we felt a Spirit move us in ways that are hard to explain among all the other feels you are feeling when you are 17. None of us was old enough to vote but we felt, many of us for the first time, that maybe our wobbling voices did matter in this church, that we did have a stake in its future. It was one of the best things I did, not only in high school, but ever.
What I didn't know at the time of trying to belt out "Day by Day" and "All Good Things" on a makeshift stage at the front of St. Raphael's, wearing too much makeup when performing "Godspell" in 1998 was that I was actually saying good-bye to that place. I have since visited St. Raph's for Christmas mass and for my uncle and my grandmother's funerals. My faith has evolved to one that suits me better, though, and I am no longer a member of the Catholic church. My faith is forever informed, though, by what I learned in that church and in that school, a place that held me and grew me and blessed me.
As the wrecking balls take to the framework of St. Raphael's, I know that a church is not a building but a group of people, doing their level best to worship and serve together. The building that rises up in its wake--bigger, better, more modern, more inclusive--does not replace the history but continues it in a different space that will hold new sounds, new tears from eighth graders, convinced they will never see one another again. Little do those eighth graders know that 20 years later, they will meet at a bar down the road from where they threw spitballs at the ceiling of their classrooms, and they will hug and laugh and take pictures and see how the wrecking balls of life haven't felled them yet, how construction crews can disassemble a building or knock down a brick wall, but they can never steamroll our memories which are, it turns out, stronger and 20 years as sweet.
