Outing Myself As Catholic
Before I even started Kindergarten I can remember wanting to be a nun, of course I also wanted to be a ballerina-supermodel-veterinarian, but I REALLY wanted to be a nun. I asked my parents for a bible for my 5th birthday and was quite disappointed that they got me an illustrated children’s version with big easy to read print. I wanted the real thing. I had envisioned a solid leather bound copy, with thin nearly translucent pages, that would be marked by my prayer cards and sit next to my bedside stand for years to come. I did not want a watered down, cheesy 70's hippie Jesus version, to me it smelled of BS (what kind of saint carried around a cartoon bible?!), but I also didn’t want my parents to know that I was disappointed and come off as ungrateful. Oh, for the internal struggles of a pious kindergartner.
My mother recently shared with me that while I was in elementary school one of my CCD teachers told her that I was very connected to the holy spirit, had religious wisdom beyond my years and that she should support me in my ambitions of becoming a nun. My mom was quietly mortified and couldn’t fathom condemming her child to a life with no hope of having a family of her own.
Now that I’m the mother of 3 boys, it’s hard for me to envision a life without the joy of having children (or men for that matter). I am on this earth to be a mama, I know that to be true with every fiber of my being. Although I do wonder what would have happened if I had been born at a different time and admit to occasionally daydreaming about a solitary contemplative life on those days that I’m stretched past my limits. The days that I’m certain that everything I own is either broken or covered in particles of poo, when I can’t remember how many times I’ve had to say “put your penis away”, when claustrophobia is creeping in and I’m desperate for a quiet uninterrupted moment to myself, that’s when being a religious mystic/hermit sounds very, very appealing.
In preparing for my first communion I was sick with the anxiety that I wouldn’t remember the prayers right. What would happen if my penence before being able to take communion was to say 5 Hail Mary’s and 2 Our Father’s but that I forgot the words? What if communion really tasted like flesh & blood and I spit it out? How was I as a mere first grader going to evade going up in flames on the spot if I didn’t follow the rules exactly?!?! For my first confession I lied, I couldn’t think of anything that I had done wrong so I said that I hit my brother when I hadn’t to make sure that I did it right. The irony was lost on me.
As a cradle Catholic, church and religion were seen as a set of rules and obligations in our family, or at least that’s how I interpreted it. We made sure that there was enough time between when we ate breakfast and when we took communion. We went out for banana splits the night before lent started and gorged on ice cream for breakfast on Easter morning. We showed up at church on time, did not let our butts rest on the pews while kneeling and b-lined it straight for the car as soon as the priest left the altar to ensure we avoided awkward small talk with other parishioners and/or traffic in the parking lot. In general there was not any discussion about faith and questions were not encouraged, except when Grandma Z came to visit.
Grandma Z was about as Irish Catholic as you could get, my dad was the youngest of her 4 red headed freckled boys. I loved joining her for her morning routine when she would stay at our house . I would wake up early and lay next to her as she pulled out her well worn prayer book and rosary. There was no rush, no rules and no fear, just this profound sense of peace as she slowly went through her long tattered list and prayed for loved ones here as well as the many that she had lost during her life. In between prayers Grandma Z would tell me about all the relatives that I hadn’t met. She shared how she lost her mother at a young age and had to drop out of school to care for her siblings, how she found that her little brother had died of the flu in his sleep when she was trying to wake him up for school, how after my grandfather had died and she was crying by herself in the kitchen that she could feel him come comfort her and give her a goodbye hug. I’m not sure my parents knew the extent to all the stories that she told me, about birth and death, about her many miscarriages and nursing her babies, but I was utterly fascinated by all the wisdom and experience that she shared. It was perhaps the best preparation for adulthood and parenting that I could have asked for. She never lectured me on religion, never said that Catholicism was the only way, never discounted or dismissed my mystical experiences, never mentioned abortion, premarital sex, birth control, homosexuality or politics. I’m sure if she were alive today we would have disagreements on some of these issues, but she never forced her faith, she simply lived it.
It was around 6th grade that I started slowly losing my connection to the church. I wanted to be an altar server so badly and was furious that I couldn’t because I was a girl, it broke my heart. No one gave me an answer for why girls couldn’t be altar servers that made any sense to me (this rule changed by the time I was in high school, but by then I didn’t care). Wonder and awe were replaced with a deep seated frustration and anger over the hypocrissy that I increasingly became aware of. CCD was no longer based on learning the liturgy, interesting open ended discussions on the church’s teachings, hearing about the lives of the saints or serving the poor.
Religious education became stale, based in fear and rules rather than mercy. From 6th to 12th grade I’m pretty sure we only went to volunteer at a soup kitchen once. I wanted to be in the trenches, I wanted to volunteer with the nuns who helped prostitues, I wanted to get arrested alongside clergy marching for peace, I did not want to do another trust building ropes course with an inauthentic, overenthusiastic youth leader or hear premarital sex compared to a worn out running shoe or pooping (I shit you not). I wanted to support the scared unmarried young mother laboring in a hospital room by herself, not be lectured about the evils of abortion and told to wear a pin with baby feet on it to raise awareness at school (this was 7th grade). I wanted to comfort and read to a lonely homebound elder, not hear about the politics of euthanasia before I could legally vote. I wanted to hold and console my gay friend who was thrown out of his home for kissing a boy, not hear about how gay sex went against God’s design. My favorite memory of CCD was the time a local police officer came in to scare us out of becoming satanists by showing us pictures and evidence from a local case where a satan worshipping, transgender women was arrested for selling pot. Mostly I was just in awe that someone so cool would even choose to live in the same suburban wasteland that I was stuck in.
After I graduated high school, throughout college and through my first marriage, I bounced back and forth between attending mass regulary and not having the stomach or nerve to go. My first husband and I separated when our baby was 18 months old. I did not receive any concerned calls from anybody at church, there were no offers of help, counseling, support or referrals as I went back to school, was working two jobs, needed to file for bankruptcy and was raising a child. The life that I had planned on was gone, my heart was shattered in a million pieces and the two interactions that I had with my previous parish was when the office called to see if I still wanted them to send donation envelopes to the same address and when the new priest asked what my status was to see if I was eligible to continue to take communion.
Even though a priest friend of my Dad’s told me that because I hadn’t been married in the church that I could still take communion, I was done. There was no way in hell that I was going to raise my son in this exclusionary, patriarchal institution that was more concerned with rules than the wellbeing of individuals. I was tired of making excuses for the church of my childhood. There was so much that I wasn’t ok with, especially everything that had started coming out about the hororific scope of sexual abuse cases, but I had kept going for so long because it was just in my DNA I guess. I kept hoping to feel that same sense of connection and peace that I felt as a little girl saying the rosary with my grandma.
No matter how many atheist authors that I read, or black metal bands that I listened to, or feminist spiritually workshops that I attended, I still felt Catholic, but that didn’t mean that I needed to subject my kid to a church that was acting more concerned with it’s image and bank account balance than the wellbeing of the children that it should have protected. So I started church shopping, I hauled my toddler around to a variety of services in different faiths and denominations until we landed at a little UCC church. It was the church equivalent of the island of misfit toys and I loved it. There were a couple elderly members who had been attending this neighborhood church since they were children, but most of the members were either retired UCC pastors and missionaries or those who were rejected from their previous denominations because they were gay (or chose to leave because their children were rejected). Anyone and everyone was welcome to come to communion, they welcomed my broken divorced self with open arms and provided a safe place to recoup, heal and see first hand that not all Christians were judgmental, jerkface hypocrites.
In the 6 years that I was a part of this wonderful open and affirming congregation, my anger at Jesus and frustration with organized religion in general started to fade. I began dating a gentleman who started attending services with me, we ended up getting married in this church and having two more babies that were baptized there as well.
But it never totally felt like home. Although I was on the leadership team at a UCC church, everything that I was reading at home was Catholic or Mary oriented. I read and re-read “Looking for Mary” by Beverly Donofrio and “Radical Reinvention” by Kaya Oakes, I devoured anything I could find that Andrew Sullivan wrote on faith. I started to drift away from our little UCC home when our much loved pastor moved out of state around the same time that I was struggling with postpartum depression and starting a new business. I secretly started following catholic mommy blogs, but binging on Conversion Diary ended up feeling a bit like fantasizing about an abusive ex-boyfriend while with a totally solid good guy, gah! Why couldn’t I just get all this catholic nonsense out of my system?
Then Pope Francis came onto the scene.
I was hopeful, skeptical, relieved and scared in the same breath. My clandestine information search ramped up. I’m sure my hold list at the public library looked like I was working on a theological thesis and I started a twitter account just to be able to follow Catholic news and blogs more easily without churching up my business account. I started having brief moments of feeling the same spiritual connection that I had as a little girl who hoped and prayed that she would one day become a sister. My husband and a few family members knew, but I was pretty quiet about when I started going to mass at a welcoming Jesuit church walking distance from our house. I went to confession for the first time in 30 years during last advent and had rejoined the church by Christmas. Although it was a huge shift going on in my life I rarely talked about it. I was and still am a bit gun shy. I did not want to have the “I’m Catholic….but (insert whatever church teachings that I struggle with here)” conversation with anybody. I don’t know why I kept it on the down low, it’s not like I have anything truly scary to face, I highly doubt that there are any ISIS members currently living in our apartment building. I just didn’t want my identifying as a Catholic to equate to agreeing with and accepting the sins of the church.
Yet the more I hear from our current pope the more I slowly and cautiously fall back in love with the faith that I was born into. Sure, the next pope could take on a totally different tone than Francis has and everything coming out of the Synod right now could be changed and shut-down due to fundamentalist backlash. But the holy father and the synod thus far have given this wounded, cynic sinner hope again.
My name is Lynn and I am a Catholic.
