Tag Archives: religion

This Thing Called Catholicism

There are two sides to the congregation, and I mean that literally.

When I walk in, I sit on the far side, but the whole time we face each other like two sides of a broken mirror, too busy focused on the other to realize something is happening in the middle.

It’s hard not to be a writer for an hour. To be silent yet engaged, alone yet together. It’s hard to sit and stand and not at least cut a glance to the girl three feet away, coughing under her blanket. The preteen three rows up, her whole body bobbing with the music. The two elderly couples in the front, turning to each other and grinning as if to say, “I have waited all week to see you again.”

I am getting better at it, but it is hard. Most of the time, it feels like I am sitting knee deep in a community that sees me as temporary.

When I was a child, and well into my preteen years, I used to keep my jacket on in church. Not because I was ready to scoot at a second’s notice, but because I was small, so small, and always cold.

Now, though, I don’t even wear a jacket. I set my purse down on the seat next to me, hoping someone might notice this gesture. See? I am staying.

When instructed, I turn to the man behind me, middle aged and Asian, and shake his hand.

“Kaleigh,” I say.

He doesn’t offer his name. None of them do.

And so I stop repeating mine, wondering if you have to earn names like Girl Scout badges, or if mine is just too Irish, too unfamiliar, too softly spoken over the din of chatter encircling our miniature introductions.

I wonder if he even knows I introduced myself.

When I leave, I go to slide the Cather into a shelf, but it doesn’t quite fit and a teenaged boy wordlessly grabs it from me, clutches it to his chest, and fits it neatly into another row. My cheeks burn with irresponsibility.

I start to remark that there is no room, I can see that, desperate to explain to someone that I am capable, but he doesn’t listen.

I wonder, then, if this is about books on shelves.

Sometimes, I’ll admit, it feels a bit like entering the high school cafeteria and watching the automatic reflex of others stretching themselves over the benches, ensuring that there is no room left for you.

There is no room for you.

I can’t see myself in the broken mirror of the congregation. I don’t know how I fit. Just that it feels less earned, more forced, than it has in my entire life. Just that every other time I entered a church not as an outside so much as a good friend, girlfriend, sister, relative of an actively-involved, regularly-committed churchgoer.

This time, I am on my own.

And I wonder if it has anything to do with books or jackets or leaving. If it’s all in my head.

Maybe, I wonder, they know I’m walking on this thing called Catholicism like a frozen lake in the middle of winter. Maybe I am nearly transparent, saying the wrong responses and singing out of tune.

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Thanks, Speedy God

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It had been nine months.

The span of time in which babies turn from ideas to breathing.

Nine months since I last stepped into a place of worship, bowed my head, and mouthed words with strangers around me on all sides.

Six years since I had bent down on wobbly knees, rubbing them raw on red-colored cushions. A flap of white cloth between my bare knees and the altar.

And I was terrified. I looked around, knew no one.

What am I doing here?

It’s the sort of question I imagine thousands of us ask for any number of reasons: we haul a caravan of rowdy children to the grocery store and wonder why it’s impossible to scan the scribbled list, navigate the aisles and wrestle the children away from the Halloween candy display; we sift through a stack of bills too tall to be ours and wonder what we’ll be doing without next month to make it work; we tuck one ankle behind the other, fold our hands, bow our heads, and wonder whether these strangers in the aisle in front of us are thinking the same thing on a chilly September morning.

For most of my life, church was a place I knew well. My second father who always tucked me into his robe and whispered to be good for my parents this week, don’t cause any trouble now. My mother’s stack of CCD workbooks sliding around in the backseat of her Jeep Cherokee, marked up with the writings of nine-year-olds who just wanted to feel like they belonged.

Like they were ready to stand up with everyone else and march to the front of the altar and bow their heads and accept God into their life.

Like they were not just watching, not the last to be picked for kickball at recess, but maybe not the captain yet either.

I wanted to feel like those nine-year-olds. So I sat and listened and looked around and waited for something that might feel like home.

And I can tell you, because I felt it over and over again, that the scariest thing this world has revealed to me is the truth: that more often than not, things don’t stay the same, but change every single second.

They had changed the responses since I last handed my Sunday to God. And I felt that nervousness, that restless feeling of losing a battle, of failing to be the kind of girl who woke up every weekend and put on her nice clothes and spent hours devoting herself to worship.

It happened when the music started. The same handful of people standing next to the altar, one guy with a guitar, and chords I knew so well.

I felt this warmth of knowing. This warmth of recognizing. That in a world where everything had changed, where I did not know the priest’s name and no one had dared sit next to me, leaving the whole row of chairs to myself, these chords had not. These words had not.

Growing up, I thought we were to whisper, “Thanks, speedy God,” instead of, “Thanks be to God.”

I spent years convinced of this. Now, I know, sometimes He is speedy. Sometimes, He works quickly. In an hour’s time, He quiets your fears.

The Girl Jesus Asked To His Middle School Dance

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I was raised hardcore Catholic.

No, not the girl in plaid pleated skirts with my button-down twisted in on itself. Not the rule-breaker, the line-walker or the daily devotionalist.

I glared at those who dared to enter the church doors like it was a semi-annual sale at Victoria’s Secret. Like we were selling something for them on those two days they packed into minivans and two-door sports cars and hauled hosts of kids, kids I’d never seen before, into the back pews just before mass began.

Imagine attending someone’s birth and funeral and nothing else. There is no way, I am sure, to know them.

They cannot tell you their stories or tap you on the shoulder as a timid toddler, grabbing hold of your heart so fiercely you forgot you didn’t want to let it go. They cannot coax you out of bed on a Sunday morning when you’d rather face the wall and count the stripes in the wallpaper.

Mostly, though, they cannot help you. Cannot ever be given a chance. Cannot ever be asked for that first dance in middle school with the beat thumping too loud for you to be sure you know what you just agreed to.

Now I know Jesus was not a hip hopper, a hipster kid, a pants-down-to-his-knees type. I know He didn’t call clichés into question or clique His way into the Perfect People Club.

If there had been a middle school dance, though, I am sure He would’ve at least attempted to ask some girl for one measly chance.

He was, after all, human for a time.

For as long—and longer than—some of us ever live. For a quest some of us dare to tackle—to etch our belief, aching in our chests, into someone else’s handprints.

And that little goal, albeit small, is something I can understand.

We coax our smaller selves into something bigger, scarier, newer. We rally our troops for something we believe in. We pound a path into the ground with our tapping feet and twirling toes.

I think Jesus was a dancer. A real crooner.

I think He knew the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you’re terrified someone won’t believe in the words spilling from your lips and stage-diving onto their eardrums. Knew the anxiety of Us versus Them lined up on opposite sides of the dimly-lit gymnasium.

Us, the Doers.

Them, the skeptics.

He was a little bit nervous, pushing glasses up the bridge of His nose, staring down at His two left feet. But He knew what He wanted. Knew where He was headed. Knew that someday He’d grow up and take this world by storm.

And you cannot help but wish you’d given those Doers a chance. Sashayed to the in-between and offered them a hand. Met them halfway.

Oh to have met them halfway. To have reached five fingers and two feet and a big bustling brain filled with ideas. To be the second Doer, the first Adopter, the first Believer.

Sometimes, it’s not the Doers we need most. It’s the Believers.

And my, oh my, do we have an army of those waiting for a Doer to sweep them off their feet. They are sitting in plastic folding chairs on the other side of your gymnasium, sipping punch and staining their lips red.

Among the red-stained lip smackers I’ve sat, fingers interlocked in my lap, itching to dance. Finally, I am standing up, pushing forward, sashaying into the center of the tiled floor. Letting this wild ride begin beneath someone else’s disco ball and a different artist’s techno beats.

Come on, grab your paper bag of granulated sugar and your metal spoon and let’s stand in my kitchen so you can force feed me the keys to happiness, tell me I’m doing it all wrong.

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I am the girl who smiles at you from across the hallway, head bent toward the floor, cheeks pink from the cold air outside and the red flush running through my veins. I am the girl who knows sorry better than “so what?”, who knows not what she apologizes for, who does not take a second step into the deep abyss of trouble without a battery-operated flashlight and a group of equally-terrified best friends.

I am the girl who once believed a smile would be enough. But it is not.

Tea drinkers might tell you they’re addicted to caffeine. They probably won’t say it’s the warmth from inside that spreads to their toes on an unseasonable October afternoon. They probably won’t tell you it’s the sound of a clinking spoon against a handspun ceramic mug. They probably won’t tell you it’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

Because a spoonful of sugar is not so sweet.

For weeks, I’ve felt like someone is shoving a spoonful of sugar into my mouth and making me swallow it. Like he or she is grabbing hold of me, duct-tapping my butt to the swivel chair in front of my desk, and demanding I read accounts of girls who struggled with something and overcame it, who said “no thank you” when it came to what they wanted because to say yes would be a sin.

And I spent one, two, seventeen years going to church every Sunday. I ran away for the same reason I’m feeling sick to my stomach now: I felt overwhelmed, almost nauseated, by the intensity of it all. By the idea that I had to be perfect always always always. Stand on the tips of my toes and reach upward and hope I might be better tomorrow because today I am still imperfect.

Today, I am still imperfect. Tomorrow, too, I’ll rise from my bed and begin the two-week trek to the end of this semester. I’ll screw up, get mad, spend money when I shouldn’t. I’ll eat dessert and lounge on the couch all afternoon and let the people in my life do the same without feeling like it all comes back to God.

Let it come back to Him. Let it. Let me here you tell me something about why I’ve felt like I’ve been through the ringer these last four years. Come on, grab your paper bag of granulated sugar and your metal spoon and let’s stand in my kitchen so you can force feed me the keys to happiness, tell me I’m doing it all wrong, that I’m being punished for not stretching myself thin.

Victoria wrote a post two weeks ago that I just got around to reading, and I could not stop scanning the page in awe. She has guts. She laid it out for anyone willing to listen. And I just wanted to thank her.

For what?

Reminding me that there is no perfect Christian. That I’m allowed to sleep at night. To live with myself. To drink my tea sweetened. To cross the line that so many have told me, again and again, I should be ashamed for crossing. I am not. I cannot be.

I’ll do what is right by me and I’ll vow to never shove a scoop of religion down someone’s throat. Because the only way to steer me from it is to push a plateful in front of me and make me eat every last morsel Matilda style.

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