Saint Therese Tackles My Cholesterol

Chris O'Carroll

Back then, with my age barely into double digits, I didn’t have a coherent philosophy about the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. The sports stories I read in those days all tended to promote the notion that athletic activity builds “character,” a nonsectarian state of grace vaguely allied with the consensus Christianity of American public virtue. The specifically Catholic inspirational literature I read would occasionally feature moral lessons drawn from the world of sports. For example, I recall a short story titled “Saint Therese Tackles Low” in which a priest helps a schoolboy football player to realize that every task we undertake in our daily lives can be an occasion of spiritual growth if we go at it prayerfully and wholeheartedly.

I don’t know how many sit-ups, push-ups, and chin-ups Saint Therese can do. (Her a.k.a. is “the Little Flower,” so how pumped up could she be?) For that matter, I can’t remember how many I was supposed to be able to do according to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. But I do recall how intensely I experienced my exertions in gym class as a spiritual quest conflating religious duty to my Creator with patriotic duty to my vigorous Catholic president. The scientists of the godless U.S.S.R. had spooked the U.S. a few years earlier when Sputnik staked a Communist claim to the sky, and there was no doubt in my mind that godless Soviet gym teachers were training a generation of muscular Yuris and Ivans who aspired to rout us on the playing field as ruthlessly as they had done in the aerospace laboratory. As I lay supine on a tumbling mat in the basement of my elementary school and another American boy knelt to hold my ankles and count my sit-ups, I knew that we were teammates on the squad favored by Heaven, and that coach Kennedy was counting on us to do the hard work necessary to make ourselves more physically formidable than the band of comrades fielded by rival coach Nikita Khrushchev.

It helped that Khrushchev himself was such a roly-poly physical specimen. Any fool could see that JFK was not only godlier by virtue of being an American and a Catholic, he was also much studlier and destined to nail a whole lot more movie stars. OK, I didn’t actually harbor that last thought at the time. The snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails of boyhood had not yet ripened into the perpetual tumescence of adolescence. Simple piety had not succumbed to complicated agnostic skepticism. I wasn’t ready to perceive the president as a horndog, but I sure enjoyed seeing him as a hunk. Had I stopped to think about it, I would have had to admit that, from a purely physical point of view, Pope John XXIII was more in Khrushchev’s camp than in Kennedy’s. The pastor of our parish, too, was generously upholstered and would not have fared well in one of those touch football games that celebrated the Kennedy clan’s commitment to virtue through vitality. As I’ve already mentioned, I had only an inchoate sense of the intimate connection between spiritual and physical fitness; I hadn’t worked it all out in any systematic fashion.

It wasn’t a particularly muscular brand of Christianity that the pastor dispensed to me and the other altar boys. His belly was big, his hair was gray, and a lot of his classmates were dead. Before saying Mass, he always consulted a book that contained a list for each day in the calendar of the priests who had died on that date. He included prayers for their souls in his daily devotions. The promise of being ritually remembered by one’s fellows in the brotherhood - it wasn’t the most exciting of job perks, but it exerted an attraction of sorts. I was one of several altar boys in the parish who got a measure of special attention designed to encourage our perceived vocations to the priesthood. The pastor shared his book of the dead and talked about looking down from heaven one day to watch me in my cardinal’s vestments at the helm of the Boston Archdiocese. That was his way of steering me toward the seminary. The job of showing me and the other boys that we could embrace the religious life and still be, you know, real guys, fell to a priest less burdened with years, a freshly ordained young man with curly hair, broad shoulders, and a love of sailing and mountain climbing.

I know where you think this story is going, but if hanging out with priests in suburban Boston is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with one’s boyish innocence, all I can say is that I was one of the lucky ones who kept clicking on an empty chamber. When Father Jim took me and my brother and other altar boys hiking in New Hampshire or sailing off Marblehead, the day’s itinerary never included any untoward embracing of the religious life, if you know what I mean. The closest I ever came to sexual contact with a priest was in a chat with Cardinal Cushing. The Archbishop whose place I was destined to take someday had come to our church to perform a Confirmation ceremony for me and other boys and girls in the parish who had hit the age of reason. Before applying the holy oil and administering the light slap on the cheek that symbolized our willingness to suffer for the faith, he took a few minutes to ply the group of us with questions, testing our knowledge of Confirmation in particular and the Sacraments in general. Could we tell him how many Sacraments there are? Did we know which of the seven was the only one that the cardinal himself had never received? I raised my hand and waited for the Prince of the Church to call on me. “Matrimony?” I suggested. “That’s right,” he said with his big, craggy working-class lad of a smile. “They can say a lot of things about me, but they can’t accuse me of that.”

Well, they can say a lot of things about me, as well, but they can’t accuse me of being a practicing Catholic these days - not for quite a few years now. By the time I was in high school, I had given up on the Sacrament of Holy Orders as a career goal and was no longer attending church with any regularity or conviction. The idea that my physical prowess might help to save the world from Communism had also lost its allure. What with Vietnam and all, the whole crusade against Communism was looking a bit suspect by that point, anyway. Oddly enough, it was during those years of apostasy and political dissent that I managed to be in the best physical shape of my life.

One of my high school friends, an Army brat who transferred into the school sophomore year, was a karate student with several years of training under his belt. (Karate, belt, get it? God, I love this language.) At 15 or 16, he was already on the verge of earning his brown belt, and would probably be ready to test for his black belt before graduation. He told martial arts stories about black belts, both American and Japanese, whom he had met. He described Asian masters with such callused knuckles that they could punch a tree trunk for hours without bleeding, such superhuman speed and precision that they could knock an arrow off course or even catch it in flight. With evangelical zeal, he rounded up a bunch of us to petition the school administration for daily karate lessons as an alternative to the established sports on the phys. ed. curriculum. School officials met with a sensei (teacher) from a Boston dojo (martial arts school), satisfied themselves that we’d be getting a sufficiently rigorous workout, and signed off on the new option. I spent the next two years doing push-ups on my knuckles and fingertips; practicing combinations of punches, kicks, and blocks; and bowing dozens of times a day to the sensei, to my fellow students, and to giant black-and-white portraits of the father and son patriarchs of our karate style. Our sensei constantly stressed the mental and spiritual discipline behind the physical demands of our workouts and sparring matches, but he also let us stage demonstrations at which we wowed the groundlings by breaking boards with our hands and feet. So I was getting a serious daily dose of physical conditioning, combined with all the ritual, hierarchy, talk of spiritual self-mastery, and the occasional let’s-put-on-a-show excitement that I’d left behind when I decoupled from the Catholic Church. The white gi and the green belt to which I eventually worked my way up (up to which I eventually worked my way? - damn, I hate this language sometimes) didn’t have quite the cachet of a priest’s vestments, perhaps, but they were at least as cool as the cassock and surplice I’d worn as an altar boy.

After high school, I let my daily workouts lapse like a lost faith. For years - for decades, in fact - I got my exercise on a purely ad hoc, catch-as-catch-can basis. Some acting classes are heavy on physical movement exercises, some directors put their casts through a few minutes of calisthenics at the start of each rehearsal, and some plays include fencing matches, high-energy slapstick and other activities that elevate the pulse rate. On the other hand, there are plenty of acting lessons that focus on nothing more strenuous than voice control and emotional authenticity, plenty of roles in which an actor’s most taxing physical challenge is lifting a teacup or passing a plate of cucumber sandwiches. I put in my share of hours lugging scenery and otherwise getting dirty backstage, but there were many days when my exercise regimen consisted of flexing my fingers over a typewriter keyboard or pacing back and forth on a comedy club stage, toning my wrist muscles by hefting the weight of the microphone. Writing and performing kept my soul in fighting trim, but they didn’t do much for my waistline.

Family life, meanwhile, was doing more to enhance my spiritual well being than any priest had ever done, and was even presenting me with occasional exercise opportunities. There were small boys to lug around in backpacks, then larger boys to play catch with in the yard or chase in and out of the waves at the beach. There was a dog who took me on daily walks, though she tended to move faster, travel farther, and breathe harder than I on those excursions. Somewhere along the way, it seemed, I had misplaced the body of that 18-year-old green belt who used to live inside this skin. I wasn’t ballooning into a self-caricature along the lines of Orson Welles or Marlon Brando, but I wasn’t getting any offers to pose for underwear ads.

I didn’t get religion about my need for regular exercise until I reached an age at which I found myself engaging in heart-to-heart talks with my father about prostate health. Three or four decades ago, when both of us had more hair and less gray, this man was assuring me that, despite whatever priests might tell me to the contrary, masturbation would not cause anything to turn blue and fall off. Now here we were comparing digital rectal exam notes. Always at my back I hear time’s winged, rubber-gloved charioteer.

When my doctor first advised me that my cholesterol numbers were higher than they ought to be, I decided to address the problem with diet and exercise. Except without the exercise. Cutting back on eggs, cheese, chocolate, and red meat seemed less painful and disconcerting than actually trying to work up a sweat every day. And hadn’t I read somewhere that red wine is good for keeping the heart healthy and the arteries clear? Pass the Merlot, hold the gym membership.

After a few months of dietary reform, I was wearing jeans with a smaller waist, and my cholesterol count was dwindling nicely, but my doctor advised me that my scheme of diet and exercise minus the exercise was not going to take the numbers down as far as I needed them to go. I was going to have to find some activity that would speed up my heart rate for half an hour several times a week. I started hinting to my wife about the cardiovascular benefits I could reap from a couple of leggy young mistresses. Sympathetic and supportive as always, she got me a stationary bike for Christmas.

Most of my days now incorporate 30-35 minutes of pumping the pedals in front of CNN Headline News, flipping the channel to Comedy Central when the ads come on. For the last week or so, though, the remote control has been on the fritz, so I’ve been stuck with the CNN commercials. I’m happy to report that they can frequently be distinguished from the news stories, if only by virtue of talking heads who appear marginally more trustworthy. I’ll sweat and pant through footage of terrorist bombings and other faith-based initiatives, through smirking pronouncements by George W. Bush and snarling pronouncements by Donald Rumsfeld, through perky chit-chat from anchors who will be right back after these messages. Then I’ll sweat and pant some more through achingly sincere come-ons from people who want to help me refinance my mortgage and add gold to my investment portfolio. I can feel the glow on my face and the dampness on my shirt. I can count my accelerated pulse. It’s practically a religious experience.

Chris O'Carroll