Maundy, maundy, can't trust that day

Note: This is a pretty long post about my personal history with religion, one of the random spurts of introspection I am occasionally prone to.

 Today is, in the Christian world, Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the Last Supper--or, as one of my very Catholic Facebook friends put this morning as his status, "And so it is that Thursday that changed the world." That makes tomorrow Good Friday (the commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus), Saturday Easter Vigil, and Sunday itself Easter Sunday, the resurrection.

As my "about me" states, I was raised in a barely-observant mixed Catholic-Protestant (UCC) household. I saw my father in church of any kind but rarely. My mother I guess gets more out of religion than either my father or I, and growing up she was still tied somewhat to Catholicism, even though I know the constant shenanigans that go on with the Catholic Church truly wore her out. Thus I spent about once a week from the age of five or six until the age of eleven in some sort of religious affair, be it religious ed classes at the local Catholic church, actually going to mass, or something similar. Although my mother's connection to Catholicism was rarely overbearing on me as a child, my mother's parents were quite strong Catholics, and so I guess there was some generational pressure to raise the latest kid to grow up in God. Interestingly, my father actually comes from the overtly religious family (his father is a UCC minister), and yet I rarely if ever discussed religion with my paternal grandparents (or my father myself, for that matter) growing up.

Maybe it's just because I'm still quite relatively young, but I do remember my very early thoughts about church and God and whatnot well. I went along with it as a very young kid, the same way any kid in a culturally Christian area goes along with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and similar. Religious ed and my mother made sure that I knew that Christmas and Easter were supposed to be about more than just the presents and the general surprise/excitement (which I truly loved, even more than the presents), but I never read much of the Bible at all in any context, be it religiously, for a literature class, or otherwise. I remember being four or five (maybe a bit older) and asking my mom if God really was an old man who sat in the clouds and looked down at everyone, and if so, how he did it. My mother tried to explain that that wasn't it, that God was more like a force, but I think that only slightly enraged and confused me--I have never liked being lied to, and even the realization that the common childhood conception of God wasn't accurate was upsetting and off-putting. (Besides, the budding storyteller in me kind of liked the idea of there really being a bearded guy up in the sky.)

After that I continued to go along with the God = force idea, although my mental conception could never quite change (all the Father, God, Son, Children language in Christianity does not help). I did first communion and first confession and all that when I was in second grade with the rest of the Catholic kids in town; although I was a tomboy and hated wearing dresses, I really did enjoy the pageantry of communion and the pageantry of church in general. It thrilled with the part of me that did then, and does still now, love world-building and cultures and stories. I had nothing to say for my first confession and, I believe, actively made up some lie about pulling my cat's tail. I learned the prayers for the rosary (which I can still recite) and the Nicene Creed (of which I cannot remember a thing now) and all the rest. My mother would go through spurts of trying to make me say Hail Marys or similar before bed, and when I stayed with her parents, my grandmother led me through the classic "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayers. I suppose they must have made some impression on me at the time, but as I grew older, I began to wonder what it actually felt like to be touched by a god and began to doubt that I had ever actually truly felt my forefathers' religion in my own bones.

I guess it was trying to figure this out, trying to feel this religion, that led me to allow my mother to make me an altar girl, starting when I was 9 or so. This, uncoincidentally, coincided quite closely with the death of my maternal grandmother from lung cancer in 1999, when I was 8, so I went at religion in the new millennium with gusto. In retrospect, it was a juvenile form of fake-it-till-you-make-it; if I wore the white overrobes, and learned the sections of the mass well, and touched holy water and oil and collections baskets and all the rest, the wonderful pageantry was alive and crackling in me, and I did believe then that this was Godly and spiritual and moving and all the rest. At some point in those early 2000s years, at the same time that I finally gave up Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I tried Catholicism for real, as best as a Biblically-ignorant young girl could do, giving up things for Lent and not eating meat on Fridays during Lent and trying to feel extreme sorrow over Jesus dying by watching the Stations of the Cross and going to Good Friday mass one year. (My mother's hatred of crowds meant that we usually never went to church on actual holidays, but this was an exception.) I vividly remember doodling INRI and crosses in my sixth grade planner at Eastertime, as though the writing out of it could prove to myself that I deeply loved God and Jesus and all the rest.


I have not thought about the depth with which I went at Catholicism in my middle school years for quite some time now, but I think I understand why it has all come rushing back so clearly this past week. Several of my closest friends here in Chicago are actually very religious Catholics, something I did not realize until I already knew and liked them well. It's one thing to go to Catholic school (I know many people who have done this), but the realization that these were people who had gone to Catholic school and actually liked it and actually been made religious because of it was mindblowing to me; all the stories I knew of Catholic school from people my age came from people who had been entirely turned off of religion because of it. Here are people who go to mass every Sunday (something I had never done even as an altar girl), who feel bad if they miss mass, who go to confession fairly regularly, who give up things for Lent with real serious and abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, who have rosaries and Bibles in their rooms, and all the rest. Here are people who seem to have managed to really take to the spirit of Catholicism far better than I, who loved the pageantry but could never get beyond it, did. At home, in high school, most of my friends were at the very least apathetic to religion, and several were pretty openly agnostic/atheist and scornful of religion. Even those who did go to church with some regularity never really spoke of religion outside of church. Maybe it's just because I never really lived with friends in high school the way I live with friends now in college, maybe it's just because Chicago is a far cry from the hinterlands of New England, but here in college I've met far more openly, seriously religious people than I ever knew even when I went to religious ed with the rest of the Catholic kiddie goobers in elementary school.


Hanging around people who read the Bible and have rosaries and go to mass and confession thus brings back all my own pre-teen attempts at Catholicism with great clarity. I remember Good Friday mass--the interminable length, the veneration of the cross, the prostration before the cross, and all the rest. I remember trying to eat fish instead of meat on Fridays for a few years; I remember spending one Good Friday off from school doing a walk for Habitat for Humanity--learning to be good and charitable. I remember even earlier events, the yearning to try communion and then the inevitable disillusion I had when it turned out that communion wafers tasted bland. Really, that disillusionment with communion is a fairly apt summary of Catholicism and I in general, of childhood in general for so many people--growing up and realizing that the body of Christ tastes a lot like a subpar cracker, realizing that there never was or could be a fat man in a red and white suit who brings presents, realizing that there never was or could be a bearded man in the clouds.


Trying to trace what led to my rejection of Catholicism is difficult. In some ways, I think coming out as a nonbeliever, even to people who are not very religious or who describe themselves as "spiritual" rather than religious, is the religious world's analogy to coming out sexually as something besides ramrod-straight. I did not know anybody, growing up, who did not believe in some sort of God or something out there, just as I knew very few openly gay people. It was not until I myself realized that I was not religious and started telling people this that I realized that some people I had always known were actually in a similar position, faking religiosity while their hearts firmly disbelieved in all the trappings of faith. When you're a young teen in white suburbia telling people that you don't believe in a conception of God that matches Christianity's, no one really believes you; every teen is rebellious, and it's really easy to dismiss it as just another teenage phase, like too-tight jeans or all-black clothes or something. Telling yourself that you don't believe in the Christian God, when you know literally no one else with similar beliefs, is just as hard; maybe it is just a phase, you think, or maybe there's something seriously wrong with you. And yet in many ways the lack of true attraction to church, the lack of emotional connection, has been there for a long time, possibly forever. Does everyone feel that way and simply fake it until they make it? Is all religion, are all religious people just going with the flow in the same way that you've always been? Are you normal, or are you weird, or are you something else?


With all these questions whirling around, it's no great surprise that, like any questioning teen, I turned to experimentation of sorts. If a God in the sky was complete crap, at least the earth was solid and real, and beautiful to boot. Paganism had been around for millennia before Christianity; I felt bad for it for being run over by Christians; there was a certain romance and exhilaration to polytheism for me, thanks to my over-reading of fantasy and Greco-Roman-era books during this period. I think the only remotely-pagan thing I ever actually did was to try to call Halloween "Samhain" and May Day "Beltane" and the like and put out food for the dead on Halloween night since the veil between the worlds is supposed to be at its thinnest then. It was still kind of fulfilling in a pageantry way, and emotionally the vague connection it gave me to the earth and other living things was inspiring in a way that Catholicism had never ever been. It wasn't real religion, however; it ultimately didn't work the way I had always been told that religion should work.


So where do you turn from neo-paganism and rebellious polytheism to active and mature agnosticism and atheism? For me it began with the religious conservative's ultimate conspiracy-theory dream (or second, in any case, only to Harry Potter): Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which I read as an eighth grader. Like with many books, there was a shiver down my spine throughout my reading of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. It was quite well-written. The mental imagery was gorgeous. The idea of my soul in animal form as my greatest lifelong companion was the realization of a dream I'd never realized I'd ever had. And there in its pages was a real person, a real human being, a writer, a published author who did not believe in the Christian God, who called the idea of it and the bureaucracy that fueled it destructive and foul and an antithesis to love itself. The world of Philip Pullman believed in the goodness and beauty of this life, not a future life, believed in actions and love and living every day to the fullest. It believed in stories as synonymous with life. I had never read or heard any philosophy like this before in my life, and this was what made my heart sing, made me feel both profoundly sad for death and yet so happy to be alive, made me feel (ironically) like I had been touched by something eternal and godlike and yet better than godlike because it was human, it was actually within my power to be and do and love.


I have never given up my love of pageantry, of details of dress and hair and rituals and songs and chants; I have never given up my idealistic love of love for everyone, even though I am in many ways the ultimate never-been-kissed, never-loved late teenage nerd girl. Not believing in a personal God, or a power above humans that actually cares at all about what humans do, or an existence beyond our existence now--believing, in essence, in the wonderful primacy and importance of this life, this here and now, this presence--has matured me, and matured in me, since I was the gawky and angsty thirteen-year-old reading His Dark Materials. To me the idea that now is as good as it gets is vestigially frightening, certainly, in the same way that I scream when I bump into someone in the dark; it's automatic to fear the end of self, of ego, of consciousness, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The endless, lurking sense of death that haunted me last summer when I flirted with depression made me cry like I have not cried in years and froze me, mind and body, like nothing else I have ever experienced. The idea that now is as good as it gets has also, however, forced me to grow and love others with as much strength and confidence as any other human ever has, with no God standing over my shoulder to ensure that I do it. My love of pageantry has left the idea that "It is that Thursday that changed the world," however, behind. In the depths of time and the vast expanse of the universe, there does not seem to be any one day that has changed the world any more than any other day has, even without looking at the logical absurdity of men rising from the dead and using that as proof of a God who loves us and cares about what happens to us. It's the Easter season, but it's also a very lovely day in April in the northern hemisphere, a day in which I and many others are alive and healthy, a day in which the earth continues to tolerate humans, and that matters to me and to many others far more than any Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, or Easter Sunday ever could.