The Soul Workout. Helen H. Moore

We were shamed when we didn't have either the pink envelope or the so-called mission money.

      With such qualities as the ability to instill an almost unnaturally keen understanding of English grammar into indifferent students and with a superhuman ability to diagram sentences, as well as an enthusiastic embrace of physical punishment as a pedagogical technique, the nuns had accepted the task of teaching Catholic theology to a sixty-member class of children of wildly disparate backgrounds, intelligences, and maturity levels. To do this they used the Baltimore Catechism, a teaching guide that, as I recall, consisted of a series of questions and answers that covered just about any aspect of Roman Catholic theology. The technique was breathtakingly simple; we memorized the questions and their answers alike, so when asked a question in class, we could parrot back the proper answer. I can still recall some from memory:

       Q. Who is God?

      A. God is the maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible. (The part about the “invisible things” always scared me.)

       Q. What is man?

      A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul and made in the image and likeness of God.

       Q. Why did God make you?

      A. God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world and be happy with Him forever in the next.

      And so on.

      For some children, this method of indoctrination—lockstep reductionism and rigid control of everything inside the classroom and out, from the cleanliness of one's skin, clothing, and fingernails, to the movies one might and might not see with one's parents, to forced participation in almost-constant religious “processions,” novenas, and children's masses, impersonally administered humiliations, unpredictably dispensed physical abuse, and the recitation of “horror stories” starring God's All-Stars, the martyrs—might have led to true spirituality and a love of God, although it was hard for me to see how. For others, it seemed to make no impression either way. Still others may have been irrevocably turned off to any idea of God, faith, or spirituality. For me, piled on top of the distorted ideas about God I was receiving at home from my well-intentioned mother, it created fear and anxiety, guilt and shame, a longing to know this God character, and a terrible fear of Him that existed simultaneously in my six-year-old heart and that lasted for most of my life.

      During second grade, much classroom time was spent in preparing us for receiving our First Holy Communion; however, that couldn't occur until we'd all made our First Confessions. We were told that we needed to rid our young souls of all the sins we had committed during our first years of life in order to be proper receptacles for God's love, and, of course, to escape “the pains of hell,” which were described to us in exquisite detail.

      Trying to explain “sin” and “repentance” to six- and seven-year-olds couldn't have been easy. So if the nuns reverted to odd analogies, who can blame them? However, because of my early religious instruction, for many years I imagined my soul as being like nothing so much as a small dish towel, floating around inside my body—white, with fringed ends. That is, it was white until I committed a sin. Then my little dish towel got stained. Sometimes it got very badly stained, but even so, there was a miraculous washday solution to the problem of sin-soiled souls: the Sacrament of Confession, which had its own terrors, but at least held the promise of salvation and relief from pain.

      During and after Catholic school, I would stray from and return to my religious roots repeatedly, especially during the years of my active addiction. I never grasped the reality of my spiritual nature until I entered recovery for what I hope is the last time. I know today that my soul is nothing like a little dirty dish towel.

      My recovery fellowship has become my “religion,” if by religion we can agree on a definition that includes a way of life and a set of principles, as well as a transcendent belief in a power greater than me.

      In twelve-step recovery I've found my soul and a relationship with God as I understand Him today, which I see is not so far removed from the God who made me to “know Him, love Him, and serve Him,” at least until my job in this world is done.

      THE SOUL WORKOUT

      Pray, even thoughyou don't believe, and take actions you don't think will work.

      Look at others who are walking

      on a spiritual path and believethat you, too, can follow.

      Be aware of thesmall miracles in your life.

HONESTY

       Looking at the Truth of My Life

      I have been a liar all my life. When I was three or four, my mother sent me to our room—we shared one, along with my father and brother, until I was almost eight—with a whack on the backside for some transgression. Today I don't even remember what it was. What I do remember is that once over the threshold, I grabbed and started to swing the bedroom door, to slam it with all my three- or four-year-old anger and might, and as I did so, stuck my tongue out at my mother as vehemently as I could. What I had failed to take into account was that on the back of the door that I was slamming was a mirror. My parents’ dresser, with its own mirrored top, stood against the opposite wall. My mother could clearly see me. I was busted by my own reflection. Fitting, wouldn't you say?

      When my mother burst into the room seconds after the door slammed to confront me for my insolence, I compounded the felony by saying, with as much false innocence as I could muster (which was a lot, even back then), “I wasn't sticking my tongue out at you, Mummy! I was sticking it out at the devil! He's the one who made me be bad!” I admit, it's pathetic, but I was only three or four years old. The spanking that then commenced was much worse than the original whack that had sent me to my room. Isn't it interesting that my tongue got me into trouble—as it would continue to do for so many more years?

      Whether or not I received spankings, I continued to lie. I lied to my mother, my father, my siblings, my teachers, my employers, my lovers, my husbands, and my friends. Why tell the uncomfortable truth when they won't understand it anyway? A lie is really just a timesaving device, and if it makes me look better than the truth would, so much the better. If it prevents me from laying out cash, better yet. If it gets me whatever I want and helps me avoid some unpleasant reality, that's best of all. At least that's what I used to think.

      I lied myself right up to the brink of death and into recovery; even then, in the beginning, I lied to myself about why I was there. Now, a half-century after that tongue-poking incident, I'm finally learning how to be honest. And not just with my words.

      I am a recovering member of a twelve-step fellowship; I do what I say I will do when I say I will do it, and I don't say things that aren't really so. And that's how my soul grows.

      THE SOUL WORKOUT

      If you let your child answer the phone, please don't ever tell them to tell the caller you're not there. It confuses and upsets them, and it teaches them that it's okay to lie.

      When you don't know something, just say so. The amount of trouble this can save is amazing.

      Have cash-register honesty. If they overcharged you a dollar, you would let them know. Let them know when they undercharge you a dollar, too.

HOPE

       Keeping My Chin Up

      When I was about six years old, my father got a Bell & Howell black-and-white home-movie camera. Because of the technology of that time, the first movie he made was silent. It shows my mother, my younger brother, and me walking along a sunny sidewalk alongside a chain-link