Waiting for the Apocalypse:
A Memoir of Faith and Family
Images
View Larger Image
By Veronica Chater
(W.W. Norton; 330 pages; $23.95)
Kids who grow up in ultrareligious families often have great
tales to tell, but the stories of Veronica Chater make you shake your head,
laugh out loud and joyfully turn the page.
Chater, who lives in Berkeley, was raised in a large,
traditionalist Catholic family in San Jose and Pleasant Hill. She could have
grown into a bitter person and an angry author, but she is neither. She turned
into an extraordinarily descriptive writer with the rare ability to make us
feel empathy in the face of intolerance and even compassion for a fanatical,
self-righteous father whom she somehow never ceases to love.
Over the past decade, I have spent countless hours
interviewing children who grew up in "religious" movements that - to
most outside observers - seem more psychotic than spiritual. Many of these kids
wound up with serious problems dealing with sex, drugs and alcohol. Some
committed suicide. But what amazed me most were the many survivors among these
children of an angry God.
Chater is one of those people who overcame her upbringing.
What separates her from her spiritually abused brethren is how she goes on to
tell her story with such skill, humor and grace. Her memoir, "Waiting for
the Apocalypse" stands as a testament to the human spirit.
Chater was one of nine children born to a father who worked
for the California Highway Patrol and a stay-at-home mother. Dad flips out over
the liberal church reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and
somehow gets it in his head that Portugal is the last refuge for right-thinking
Roman Catholics. So he quits his job and drags his wife and kids halfway around
the world, only to find out that Satan lives in Portugal, too. So he hauls them
back to the Bay Area, penniless, and falls in with an ultra-traditionalist,
rabidly anti-communist Catholic cult known as the American Society for the
Defense of Tradition, Family and Property. Dad has enough sense to leave that
group when he comes up against Nazi sympathizers in its ranks, only to then
sign up with the Society of St. Pius X.
The most enjoyable parts of Chater's story are her tales
from the early years, before her father falls in with Catholic cult leaders and
attempts to reconcile his traditionalist views with his neighborhood parish.
Chater and her siblings look with weekly dread to the part
of Sunday Mass when parishioners turn to each other, shake hands and say,
"Peace be with you." Dad sees the hand of Satan in this modernist
innovation, so he demands that his wife and embarrassed kids shut their eyes
and grasp their hands together whenever their fellow Catholics try to reach out
to the large, weird family.
To her father, Vatican II was a sign that the end of the
world was at hand. He spends years railing against the church reforms,
convincing his kids that opening Rome's windows allowed "the Smoke of
Satan" to enter the church. As Chater summarizes her father's views, the
church reforms "muddled everyone's brains, making them modern and sinful
and prone to divorce. And now Catholics everywhere were behaving like
Protestants, which was only one stop away from being atheists, which was no
different from being Communists."
One of the things that make this book so delightful is the
way Chater contrasts her father's apocalyptic visions with the seemingly
normal, suburban San Jose neighborhood that she called home in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. To her young mind, the utter certainly that this suburban
bliss will soon explode into an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and
evil is not something to dread, but a blessing to await in joyful anticipation.
"If hell opens its gates and spills out Satan and his
army of demons, Dad will take his .357 Magnum from his holster and shoot them,
shouting for us to take cover. And if a demon should escape the bullets, Dad
will swing his leaded spring billy club with just enough snap of the wrist to
bend it midair and double the force of the impact. And if more demons come,
he'll perform his special Judo flip - a move that puts the opponent's strength
to the defendant's advantage - and lock the demons in handcuffs and shove him
into the backseat of his patrol car."
What really happens in the end is what often happens in
families like this: The kids grow up. They wake up. They rebel, smoke pot, get
pregnant and, worst of all, start thinking for themselves. What's different
about this story is the way Chater remembers the journey and writes it all
down, so masterfully, for the rest of us.
Don Lattin worked for nearly two decades as The Chronicle's
religion writer. His most recent book is "Jesus Freaks: A True Story of
Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge," which is now available in
paperback from HarperOne. E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page J - 1 of the San Francisco
Chronicle