Father Briar and The Angel (28 page)

After seeing them off, he
barreled his way back into the icehouse to find her standing there
next to the fire, as healthy and as pink and as naked as a newborn
babe.

She had emerged from the
lake seconds ago without effort, with the last mystical words that
had been spoken to her still ringing in her ears like a bell, like
a pure and silver bell.

“
And I saw that truly
nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God's wise
providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of
view, our blindness and lack of foreknowledge is the cause; for
matters that have been in God's foreseeing wisdom since before time
began befall us suddenly, all unawares; and so in our blindness and
ignorance we say that this is accident or luck, but to our Lord God
it is not so.”

“
Baptize me,” she
commanded, “I’ve already been fully immersed.”

And so he did.

“
Let us ask our Lord Jesus
Christ to look lovingly on this child who is to be baptized, on her
parents and godparents, and on all the baptized.”

Nude but warm, she
shivered, not from cold, but the Holy Spirit.

Father Briar
continued.

“
By the mystery of your
death and resurrection, bathe this child in light, give her the new
life of baptism and welcome her into your holy Church.”

They said in unison, “Lord,
hear our prayer.”

He recited every word in
precise, beautiful Latin, and at the end, after he’d traced the
outline of the cross on her forehead in ice water, adding a phrase
of his own:

“
God forgive us for our
small sins,

and thank you for great
miracles.”

Epilogue:

Julianna and Cedric’s
relationship lasted many decades longer than Joe DiMaggio and
Marilyn Monroe’s. After New York/Hollywood power and glamour couple
returned to the United States after their ill-fated and aborted
honeymoon, tension between the combustible personalities continued
to build, particularly around DiMaggio’s discomfort with his wife’s
sexy image, the very same image that had to attracted him to her in
the first place.

They had the first of
their many famous public falling outs in September 1954, as
Julianna and Cedric’s beautiful summer turned to a golden autumn.
It was in New York City, on set of
The
Seven Year Itch
. As Monroe filmed wildly
erotic (especially for the time) scene in which she stands over a
subway grate with the air blowing up her skirt, a photo
memorialized in a many a Navy man’s mind for the next fifty years,
an image sexy enough to bring a Kennedy to his knees.

Naturally, a crowd of
onlookers and press gathered (one wonders how the asphalt didn’t
melt beneath them, such was Norma Jean’s hotness); As her skirt
blew up again and again, the crowd cheered uproariously, and the
Yankee Clipper, who was on set monitoring his wife’s behavior, he
lost his infamous temper.

Julianna thought
the Seven Year Itch
was
amazing, a view shared by Father Briar
.

DiMaggio and Monroe were
divorced in October 1954, just 274 days after they were married. In
her filing, Monroe accused her husband of “mental cruelty.” She
married the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, who had extensively
written about the aforementioned Sen. Joe McCarthy.

When the 36-year-old Monroe
died of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962, DiMaggio arranged the
funeral. For the next two decades, until his own death in 1999, he
sent roses several times a week to her grave in Los
Angeles.

The morning of November 29,
1964, ten years after the events of this story, was a remarkable
one in the religious life of American Catholics, and Catholics
worldwide.

Brannaska parishioners
sitting in their places that morning knew something was different,
very very different than they had been before, from the start of
Mass.

The week before, and the
week before, and every week any of them could remember, the priest
and altar boys had entered in reflection and silence.

Now there was singing.
Singing! Two verses of a processional hymn. Father Briar, standing
behind a brand new altar set up in the middle (the middle!) of the
sanctuary, still said some prayers in Latin, but for the most part,
the ancient and traditional language of the Church was
gone.

The Brannaskans, who’d had
warning this change was coming but never really believed it, were
encouraged to recite others along with him, again in their own
language. Some of them prayed in German, one in Polish, and most in
English.

The distribution of
Communion was now different. Since the dawn of the faith, the
priest had repeated a prayer in Latin as he worked his way along
the line of parishioners kneeling at the altar.

Now paused in front of
each parishioner, in many places standing rather than kneeling
(standing!), held up the Communion host so they could see it, and
said, “
Corpus Christi
” (“the Body of Christ”), to which the communicant responded,
“Amen”.

That historic morning, as
he blessed Julianna, who looked radiant and full of love and joy,
he also thanked God for the simple power of sex and love and asked
his forgiveness for indulging in it.

The Church discontinued
Latin entirely by 1969. Julianna and Cedric’s love lasted decades
longer, well into the 1980’s, although Latin did have a pretty good
run: it is tough to argue with two thousand years of
success.

Notes and Historical
Sources:

Interviews with kind folks
who participated in both the Catholic life and the farming life of
this era in Minnesota irreplaceably valuable.

Most of all, the author
would like to thank her mother. That is no disrespect (and much
love!) to fathers, but, as Julian of Norwich once said, “Our Savior
is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we
shall never come.”

The Facebook group, a true
collaborative, “Old Minneapolis” as a joy and a source of support
and inspiration, if not material directly relevant to the book. But
as any author knows, material not being related to the book is
often full of truth, portent and unexpected investigative
joys.

Various blogs, forum posts,
and personal, self-published reminiscences, have all been helpful
in providing background and detail to a book that would otherwise
gone a little unseasoned and bland without them.

If you think, wherever and
whoever you are, that the personal and cherished details of your
lives, that you’ve self-published to audiences of your friends and
family have gone unnoticed, I assure you with devout faith: they
have not.

While we all, if we are
moral creatures, be wary of the Catholic Church’s history of
despicable criminality when it comes to issues of land and
art-theft, not to mention its unconscionable treatment of young
boys by pedophile priests. But equally spurious is the idea that
all men and women of religious service somehow become perverts
without a moral compass is equally untrue. There were good people
throughout the clerical bureaucracy, hundreds of thousands of them,
and to ignore them is to do a disservice to many just and noble
human lives.

“
All we are

is all we are,”

Like Kurt Cobain, like Bill
Haley and His Coments, like the Hoosier Sodbusters, once sang in
what sounds both like a Buddhist Koan and the belief of a Catholic
mystic like Julian of Norwidge.

What we are is love. May
Cedric Briar and Julianna Warwidge live and love for a good long
run, as long as grey wolves, as long as Latin, as long as love
itself.