It was St. Blaise Day, when Catholics go to church to get their throats blessed. St. Blaise (San Blas in Mexico, Saint-Blaise in Canada) is the patron saint of throat ailments—everything from the odd fish bone to spasmodic dysphonia, which afflicts R.F.K., Jr., our new health czar. In the Irish Catholic Church of my pre-Vatican II childhood, St. Blaise Day meant lining up in the center aisle and having Father Séamus P. Ó Cionnaith hold a pair of crossed beeswax tapers at your neck. You know who else would be a good patron saint of throat ailments? Dr. Heimlich Maneuver.

Just because you are no longer a practicing Catholic doesn’t mean you can’t go to church and get your throat blessed, right? If you’re desperate? I was desperate. On Election Night, I prostrated myself in front of the TV, to no effect. I went on a strict news fast, broken only after the Inauguration, when things got so bad—what with the perverse Cabinet appointments and the hacking of upright citizens’ Social Security accounts, along with the certainty that it was only going to get worse—that I contemplated a return to the Church. Consulting the internet, I found a twelve-o’clock Mass with throat blessing at St. Brigid’s in Alphabet City.

Many things conspire to keep a retiree from getting out of the house in the late morning. I couldn’t find my shoes or my watch; I had to charge my hearing aids; I had smoked a wee bit of weed, which is probably what inspired me to get my throat blessed in the first place but was now hindering me in that effort. I dithered over whether or not to take my Buddhist prayer beads. Would they help me blend in, or arouse suspicion?

On the street, three dachshunds in pink down jackets were sniffing around in a tree pit. Their owner avoided eye contact. A sign in front of a chapel read, ambiguously:

No trespassing
after 10 PM
on
church property

Where did they post the regular trespassing hours? Also, whatever happened to the concept of sanctuary? The Little Free Library in the park was bare of books. I stopped in a botanica, thinking I might find comfort in a worry stone (I’d decided against the beads), and came away with a crystal ziggurat the size of a vial of eye drops. It felt good in my hand, and I liked the way it caught the light, plus it was the only stone with a price tag on it, and I didn’t feel like haggling.

I beat on over to Avenue B and the Church of St. Brigid, which was built by the Irish in New York in gratitude for the passing of the potato famine. Outside was a statue of St. Brigid with a heifer. Works attributed to her include changing water into beer and performing a miraculous late-term abortion on a nun. Brigid got demoted by the Pope back in 1969, because there was not sufficient proof of her existence. You know who else suffers from insufficient proof of existence? Hint: It’s not St. Patrick.

My short-term memory is frankly in tatters, so I may have misremembered the hour—or, for that matter, the year—of the St. Blaise Day Mass and throat blessing. When I arrived at St. Brigid’s, the doors were closed, and there was no one around, not even a guy sneaking a cigarette out front during the sermon. Either I was late or the Mass has gotten shorter. I tried the doors, but they were locked.

Had I really expected, after fifty-plus years of devout hedonism, that I would be welcomed back into the Church according to my whim? Well, yes. Wasn’t there something about infinite mercy? Then again, if I was afraid of undergoing a serious conversion—which I was, a little—I was saved. ♦