Under the Skyflower Tree: Reflections of a Nun-entity

by Mona Castelazo

Overview

A memoir told with candor and humor, Under the Skyflower Tree follows one woman's spiritual journey in the Catholic faith.

Author Mona Castelazo shares the humorous stories of growing up Catholic in Fresno, California. Her calling to the religious life, her subsequent formation in the convent, and her early teaching career occur at a time of sweeping changes in the Catholic Church--Vatican II.

Castelazo embraces change as a person determined not to be a non-entity, but instead, a "nun-entity." Her narrative begins in her days as an inquisitive and precocious young girl and continues until she becomes a critically thinking, mature adult, rejecting the "regurgitation of answers" as unacceptable for herself and her students. The English teacher shares a bit of her own poetry throughout this captivating memoir.

Under the Skyflower Tree speaks to those interested in spiritual growth, human development, insightful literature, the wisdom of personal experience, and the beauty of remaining open to where life takes you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780595336647
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/03/2005
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d)

Read an Excerpt

UNDER THE SKYFLOWER TREE

Reflections of a Nun-entity

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By Mona Castelazo

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 Mona Castelazo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-595-33664-7

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Chapter One

Original Puzzles

Original sin always puzzled me. It appeared to be neither "original" nor "sin," strictly speaking. It seemed unoriginal, since all of us experience its effects, being subject to ignorance, suffering, evil, and death. It seemed not to be sin at all, in the ordinary sense of the word, because it is not personally chosen. At least, if I had a choice, I'd rather have something else.

When I was "growing up Catholic," we were taught that original sin was transmitted in some mysterious manner from Adam and Eve to their descendents and eventually to us, through our own parents. Since all people share the same predicament, it might have served as a common bond, but being negative, perhaps it was more like having the same family skeleton in all of our closets. In which case, its very presence might account for the universal tendency of people throughout the ages to make a great display of their differences, rather than to let the secret out.

Because I went to a public grammar school, I attended catechism classes in private homes. I was excited by the large charts that the sister catechists used to reveal the mysteries of God to us in a colorful fashion. When it came to abstract definitions to be memorized, I was less interested. Once I carried on a sub-rosa conversation with the girl sitting next to me while the sister teaching us presented the portion of the lesson to be memorized. She called on me to repeat what she had said, adding, "Can you do two things at once?" I answered correctly, giving her to believe that I could do two things at the same time, but I had merely repeated the words; no understanding was required.

After having experienced the dark box of the confessional for the first time, I made my First Communion and returned to the class several weeks later. Sister asked me if I had gone to confession. I said, "Yes." (Didn't she know that?) We had some difficulty in communicating until I finally realized that she meant that I should return to confession regularly. I was dumbfounded! No one had made it clear to me that I had to go through that more than once. It was unfair—I had thought all that was behind me.

When I was very young, my mother asked me why I had done a particularly unacceptable thing. I answered truthfully, "I had a chance at it." The thought that I had to tell on myself regularly in confession seemed to reduce my chances in life. We were taught that God watches everything we do—why tell a priest about something that God had already seen in a more colorful version on "action news"?

I went to confession the first time good naturedly, but became less cooperative about it as time went on. Sometimes I hid when I knew we would be going to church for that purpose. Other times I performed songs and dances on the way over, hoping to lure my mother in a different direction, but we always ended up at the church door in spite of my efforts.

The clearest memory I have of confession during my school days was admitting that I stole a piece of pie off a large dessert cart when I played the violin for a Knights of Columbus dinner. Our musical group wasn't invited to the dinner, but I polished off a slice of cream pie in the kitchen on my way back from the rest room. (I feel free to share this without breaking the seal of confession, but you could not hear this from my confessor with impunity.)

Later in life I learned that the sacrament of penance had been originally intended for serious, scandalous sins, which affected the morals or morale of the community at large. The sinner was to confess and do public penance. (This practice seemed to have been adopted in the last decade of the twentieth century by the executive branch of our national government.)

Telling the truth was a virtue, and deceit a matter for confession, but I learned at an early age that mysterious complexities determined which truths were to be told. Sitting at the family table, I once opened a birthday gift that I hated on sight. Immediately my face gave a truthful response, but I was told to smile and say "Thank you." To my horror, I realized that I was doomed to a life of deceit.

When I expressed an honest dislike for certain vegetables on my plate, my visiting godmother said, "What would you say if I told you that there were starving children in Europe who would be lucky to get those vegetables?" I truthfully answered, "To that, I would say—Hoo, Hoo!" I don't remember her reaction (or my mother's) at that time. However, when we visited a friend of my grandmother's who lived in a small house surrounded by trees in Marin County, my honesty produced a reaction from both my parents and my grandmother. I observed to its owner, "This is a very little house, and you're a very big lady, aren't you?" I was sent back to apologize to her before we got into the car. She seemed even bigger when I had to confront her alone. My parents administered just punishments when necessary, but the ambiguous ones come more readily to mind.

Visiting cousins in Vallejo, I found my way into a bedroom and crawled under a little table. Putting my hand up over the table, I felt some pieces of cardboard that came apart in different shapes as I squeezed them. I couldn't see the top, but the pieces started to fall down, unique in size and color. Most fascinating! I had nothing like this in my room at home. Then one of my cousins came by and called to my aunt, "Look what she's doing!" as if I were engaging in an evil activity. Evidently the jigsaw puzzle that I was dismantling delightedly had taken quite a few hours or days for my cousins to assemble.

I began to feel that original sin had to do with acts that seemed innocent, but were stamped "bad" upon completion. For example, a boy down the street had told me about a girl and boy who had crawled under a bush and performed a strange action that produced a baby. It was the tallest, most ridiculous tale I'd ever heard. I couldn't imagine how or why anyone could have dreamed up such a silly story, much less expected anyone to believe it. I shared it with my father who had a good sense of humor and delighted in incongruities. To my astonishment—and considerable pain—he gave me a quick but effective spank. I wanted to tell him that I hadn't believed the story, but a sudden intuition that there was more significance to it than I had allowed stopped me. Surely not ... it couldn't ... be ... true? Maybe there had been some strange occurrence, a freak accident of nature, that others knew about? But I was given no more enlightenment that day.

Other evidences of my original waywardness began to crop up. I was interested in words and, having learned two new words (from the same boy down the street), I tried them out at the dinner table. My father was from the San Francisco Bay area and always spoke of it as "The City." When I pronounced my newfound contraction, "Frisco," it outdid a four-letter word. Hoping to redeem myself, I asked for the "mouse turd." I hadn't learned the meaning of the second term of the compound, and can't remember if the mustard came my way, but my request certainly provoked attention.

Having a tendency to question everything was another trait of mine that seemed under suspicion. One morning when I was on the floor playing with toy cars, I asked my mother why there weren't any red cars in the world—at that time there weren't. She explained that only fire engines and fire chief's cars could be red. I asked why that was so and the question stumped her. I thought that if someone had decided that only certain cars could be red, someone else could very well change it. It was one of my first experiences of the "they" that decided things that others unquestionably go along with.

Another example of my tendency to wonder took place when we visited my maternal grandmother's house one morning. Sunshine fell on some of the furniture in the bedroom—a stuffed brown armchair, a bedspread. The room had a comfortable, lived-in feeling of everyday life that contrasted with my intuition of a deep mystery behind the existence of the things in the room. I knew others had been there and seen these things before me and would be there again, but how did this all work? How did time work? I had a feeling that the immediacy of the reality of this moment was not looked upon as extraordinary by anyone else in the house. One evening I sat at our dining room table by myself long after it had been cleared of dinner things, bounced my fist on the table and wondered, "Why am I here? Why is this table here?" I was aware that the others in the house didn't seem to be sitting around wondering about existence—at least not their own. Some of them did question my existence on occasion as Tommy, my little brother, did when my mother explained to him that she loved all of her children. He was incredulous, "You mean her too? But she's so screamy." In retrospect, I think of myself as having been a quiet child, but perhaps memory is partial at best.

One of the effects of the Fall of our first parents is said to be physical suffering. When I was five I was visited by an attack of appendicitis at my birthday party. The doctor came to our house and said I needed an operation. That evening at the hospital I was taken to surgery. As I went under the ether, I imagined a dark little cave with a star man sitting in it, rocking back and forth to the tiny beeps of the machine. When I returned home from my hospital stay, I felt like a "star" myself, being the only kid on the block with an appendectomy scar. I decided to show it to the boys down the street. We went into the small playhouse for the viewing. I was feeling rather special until the top of the playhouse disappeared, and I felt the spanking end of the short arm of the law upon me. My father was a diminutive man, but strong. I learned then that showing off was a bad thing—at least a private showing of private parts. Years later Dr. Seuss wrote a book about Star-Belly Sneeches who felt superior to the other sneeches—those without stars on their bellies. This cautionary tale might save small children today from behaving like the Star Bellies, but I learned the hard way.

My original tendencies certainly did seem to need correction. I did not take to being "nice" readily. Although I distinctly remember my mother's having said, "Some of us are not ladies," she disremembers it. "Disremembers" is one of my recently acquired vocabulary words. I learned it from having questioned the use of the word in a student's paper in one of my English classes. After finding it in a few other papers, I looked it up. I had never seen it in print and am not sure when it came into common usage, but it is in the dictionary. I disremember having seen it elsewhere.

Niceness training began early. One of my earliest lessons took place when a friend of my mother's came to visit. She spoke to me kindly and, in order to show my enthusiasm and friendliness, I kicked off one of my small shoes toward the ceiling. Instead of the appreciation I expected for such a feat, my mother took me into the hallway, closed the door, and told me solemnly that "nice girls" didn't do such things, and that no one thought it was cute or funny. Looking back, I still think it was a more interesting response than saying, "How do you do? How are you?" or other conventional responses. But it was an effective lesson—I haven't kicked a shoe off in greeting since.

As far as ladylike practices, I took a dim view of them—wearing dresses in particular. I always preferred jeans or pants. The one place where dresses definitely had to be worn was at church. Once when my mother was away, I tried to talk my father into letting me wear pants to Mass. I pointed out logically that although he was eager to have me put on a dress, it was easy for him, because he didn't ever have to wear one. He went out of the room to think it over, being a reasonable man. Sitting confidently in my room on the floor, where I had been lamenting my fate, I was taken by surprise when he came back, squeezed into one of my mother's dresses. He thought it was funny. I was not amused. I still had to wear a dress. When he returned down the hall, I could see that the opening of the back of the dress made a big V and revealed most of his freckled back—he hadn't been able to button it.

My father was a cheerful man and a gourmet cook by hobby. On Sundays he cooked bacon and made pancakes in animal shapes for a fine breakfast after Mass. The process required a liberal sprinkling of flour around the kitchen and the opening of almost all of the cupboard doors. It was taken for granted that part of a woman's role was to serve as a cleanup crew, according to my observations of my mother. We enjoyed eggs, sausages and sometimes doughnuts, maple bars or bear claws—all of which I appreciated with fairly ladylike decorum.

However, the real bear claws that my father was given by a hunter friend were another story. Gourmet cooks seem to think they have to try everything. The cooking of these paws from a real bear resulted in a foul, greasy, penetrative odor, which called forth unladylike comments from me, including a vow that I would never enter the family house again. My resolve finally broke down, but I remember watching the outside of the house from the other side of the street as it got dark and the lights went on.

One special Sunday activity was taking a ride in the country. In early spring the redbud trees blossom in the foothills above Fresno—one of the first signs of spring. There is little else of interest to be seen in the countryside before the leaves return and the wildflowers bloom. At that time of year, my parents liked to drive out and look for the redbuds. Perhaps it was too early in the season on one particular Sunday. In any case, the countryside looked barren to me, the day was overcast and midway through the trip I shouted out in a burst of unniceness, "Take me out of this old dead country!" Perhaps this was the sort of thing to which my brother had referred?

Years later, I was consoled by the thought that evidently C. S. Lewis hadn't valued niceness either. In the third book of his space trilogy, That Hideous Strength, he places the villains in operation of an institution called N.I.C.E. In the novel the letters stand for "National Institute of Coordinated Experiments," an organization run by a disembodied head ruled by evil forces. Its purpose was to take control of Earth by capitalizing on a group of scientists who had begun to idolize facts, knowledge and abstraction. The N.I.C.E. people tortured both animals and humans, destroyed the natural countryside, and ruined relationships by turning people against each other through fear and suspicion. All this was said to be done in the name of progress and the good of humanity.

Imagination, rather than abstraction, interested me. I was to become an avid reader, walking to the library regularly to find stories. But sitting trapped in the presence of unsolved problems in arithmetic or trying to draw the hands on endless pages of clocks to learn to tell time, felt to me like N.I.C.E. torture. Mystery and possibility held a fascination for me. Sitting in the backyard on an afternoon when the sky was blue, the sun shining, the grass green, I again felt there must be more behind all of it than what I could see. I felt mysteriously confined. Would I get to see all of it someday? I looked around over the fences next door into empty yards. I couldn't see the neighbors, yet I knew they existed. What were they all doing? In this one moment of time I would never know. What did it all mean? Did all of them sit around wondering too? When I went into the garage and stared at the wall of wooden boards, I knew that there also must be more there than I could see. What if the wall moved aside like a curtain and I could see behind it? At the time of World War II, people were drawing a figure looking over a wall captioned, "Kilroy was here." Following that spirit, I found some chalk and drew a Kilroy, adding footprints going up and down the garage wall. I know I (like Kilroy) was there because the marks are still in that garage. Fortunately, I didn't mention any of these tendencies to anyone, or I might not have been considered to be "all there" myself.

Table manners were part of being nice. I remember frosty mornings in Fresno when I would have preferred to put my hands into the hot cereal rather than eat it, but had learned enough by that time not to try it. At lunch one day, when I had eaten around the outside of an apple, my grandmother inspected it and said, "You missed the best part," indicating the part nearer to the core. I thought that if she considered that to be the best part, she could have it, but politely scrutinized it as if considering her suggestion. All the adults I knew had proper table manners, or at least seemed to know what they were. However, an exception comes to mind. One summer when my Uncle Jim came to lunch, my brother decided to crawl around barefoot under the table. My uncle reached down, caught a dirty bare foot with one hand, and deftly spread butter all over the sole. Delighted with such a display of freedom by an adult, I began to realize what a superior man my uncle was.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from UNDER THE SKYFLOWER TREE by Mona Castelazo Copyright © 2005 by Mona Castelazo. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword....................xi
One Original Puzzles....................1
Two From Novice to Teacher....................23
Three Many Changes....................47
Four Quandries and Questions....................74
Five Time Out for Answers....................94
Six Coming to My Senses....................116
Seven Theories and Beyond....................134
Eight "Which Vice is Versa?"....................152
Nine Full Circle....................168