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CHAPTER 1
The word catechism derives from two Greek root words: kata, meaning "down," and echein, "to sound into the ears." In other words, catechism is indoctrination, and in one medieval illuminated manuscript, the catechism teacher is depicted hollering scriptures through a giant trumpet into a cowering heathen's ear. Today, the church uses Xerox machines to the same effect. A few days before I begin catechism, I go to pick up a folder of readings Father Mellow has left for me at the front desk of the church. It's so thick and bristling with Post-it notes that both hands are required to heft it, and suddenly my suspicions become real: there is a lot of catching up to do.
When I get home and peer into the folder, I find, among other things, an essay by a woman who left her position as a Unitarian minister to become Catholic, a piece about "why Catholics have more fun" (apparently, they dance more at parties, which is news to me), and sheaves of information about how to read the Bible (thankfully, not literally; Vatican II's constitutions encourage Catholics to interpret scripture as something inspired by God rather than swallowing it as fact). There's also an essay by a former punk rocker who says she stopped swearing during her process of conversion. As soon as I read that one, I blurt out, "Fuck that shit," after which I abashedly mutter, "Sorry."
The volume of reading and what it implies about my years out of the church has made me so apprehensive about the first night of class that my already pale face is probably translucent, but I suck it up, put on my glasses to navigate the blue-black evening, and climb the stairs to the meeting room. The fireplace flickers, classical music tinkles out of the stereo, and a few people are chatting. It looks like what I imagined faculty parties would be like before I became a faculty member and discovered that my school didn't have the budget for parties. The class has been on a break for a month and is just coming back together, and as I stand there awkwardly smiling at strangers, I hear snatches of conversations about vacations, kids, jobs. Father Mellow comes over, grabs my hand, and thanks me for coming. He's dressed in street clothes, and I'm grateful; clerical collars still intimidate me. (It's like chatting it up with God's cop when a priest wears one.) At first glance, it appears that everyone here is middle-aged, but soon enough, a couple of young dudes wander in, dressed in sloppy flannels and Vans, and everyone migrates to a loose circle of couches.
There are a lot of people in RCIA, more than twenty. Many people have a sponsor, a practicing Catholic who will guide them through the process of entering or re-entering the church. I don't have one yet. In the case of my class, some of these sponsors come every week, shepherding their charges through every session, and I can't tell who's who. I discover that one woman brings an entire entourage: her husband, her female sponsor, and her sponsor's husband. She tells me it's because they're worried she won't otherwise make it. She was brought up Muslim, married a Catholic in her twenties, and decided after decades of going to Mass that it was time to get baptized; he'd had a couple of heart attacks. One of the class leaders was brought up Jewish, and other students come from various Protestant denominations. Prior to tonight, I had no idea that people were leaving perfectly fine religions for this one. I'd figured only Mormonism made Catholicism look like a logical choice.
A couple of guys are accompanied by their fiancées, young women with concerned eyes who hold the guys' hands tightly for the entire two hours, as if they might otherwise bolt. In order to be married in a church, the guys have go through RCIA or a marriage "immersion program." There's one other youngish woman who appears to be there on her own, like me. I've been coming to weekly Masses for a month to try and prepare and maybe see a familiar face, but I've never seen any of these people before, and I'm painfully awkward around strangers. In a group of potential Catholics who've already been meeting for months, I feel like there's a sign above me reading HEATHEN, and I try to jam my big body more deeply into the sofa so as not to take up too much room.
Things officially begin when Rachel, who's compact, with bright eyes surrounded by a corona of frizzing black hair, announces that they're going to go around the room and talk about a ritual they did at one of the Advent Masses, the four-week liturgical season leading up to Christmas. Fortunately, since I didn't attend any of the Advent Masses, I only have to introduce myself. Listening to the others, I ascertain that one night in December, everyone had to get up on the altar at Mass and talk briefly about why they wanted to be confirmed or baptized Catholic. This sounds like a nightmare. Despite my career as a teacher and the dozens of readings I've given over the course of my writing life, getting up and speaking extemporaneously about faith when you're still in the nascent stages seems terrifying, so I brace myself for a lot of stories of embarrassment and shame and feel terrible for these poor people who had to spill their guts in front of hundreds of strangers.
But this isn't what they talk about. They admit they were nervous, and some of them joke that they couldn't come up with a single reason to be Catholic so they made something up ("I'm just here for the donuts," one guy blurted), but there seems to have been a sort of blessing involved, and people are grateful for that. When the catechumens shuffled up to the altar, their sponsors blessed their heads, shoulders, hands, and feet, and softly made the sign of the cross on each one. You don't see people kneeling down to bless one another's feet all that often in contemporary culture, and the gesture is startling.
When we see an antiquated ritual, rare as sustained eye contact between strangers on a city street, it has the power to shock. Sponsors get nothing for their participation — no heavenly brownie points in the form of an indulgence or time off from making confession — yet most of them come every week, humbling themselves by kneeling down and blessing the feet of their friends, husbands, wives, and children or laying a hand on a shoulder to steady someone.
The circle moves on, and as it turns out, I'm not the only newcomer in the room. There's a rotund, middle-aged guy who says he's coming back to the Church for the first time since childhood, nearly fifty years ago. His glasses are smudged, and he gestures widely, circumscribing circles with the tips of his fingers. He's a historian, and it seems the topic of Catholicism is tough to avoid in his particular branch of history, the history of war. "It's a growth industry," he sighs.
We're given a syllabus for the next few months. Our lessons will be about the sacraments and rituals that go along with them, plus some information about church ministries and an ominous sounding evening on "moral theology," whatever that is. We'll also need to attend certain Masses in order to go through something called the "Scrutinies," which sounds like some sort of torture device the church hauls out of a closet for particularly egregious sinners. Father Mellow quickly interjects that the Scrutinies aren't as scary as they seem; basically, they're a chance for the church community to get to know the catechumens a little and to help purify you before Easter. That's slightly better.
The first sacrament we go over is the logical one: baptism. There's an expression Catholics use for non-converts. They call them "cradle Catholics," and since most baptisms take place when one is a squalling infant, it makes sense. Jacob, Benjamin, Rebecca, and Rachel, the class leaders (or "team," as they prefer to be called, rah rah), each talk briefly about their own baptisms. Jacob, Benjamin, and Rebecca were all baptized as babies and are now well into middle age, so they admit they remember little about the process. Rachel, who converted from a semi-secular version of Judaism, refers to herself as a "baby Catholic," since she was only baptized eight years ago. She describes the weeks leading up to her baptism, when she learned that she wasn't going to have to make confession and felt relieved. "Let's be honest," she says, "I was forty years old and that was going to be a long confession." Baptism acts like a kind of blank slate. You get dipped in water, which washes away your sins, and Rachel remembers listening to the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack in the weeks before Easter, particularly the song about going down to the water to pray, and feeling a sense of relief; she was beginning again. Two adults in this group will be baptized at Easter. The rest of us will be confirmed, and that means we have to make confession at some point. Oh shitty shit shit. How am I going to remember all those sins?
* * *
Three years ago, I sort of had a nervous breakdown. I hesitate to call it that, because it wasn't as glamorous as breakdowns seemed to be when I was studying poetry in graduate school. All the breakdown poets seemed to be varnished with at least a little historical gleam, as if their straightjackets were just a bit better-looking than the ones we might someday wear. John Berryman is one of my favorite poets, and his breakdowns were freaking spectacular. When he finally pitched himself off a bridge, he aimed badly and crushed his skull on the riverbank. "Life, friends, is boring," he once wrote. I wasn't nearly that bad, but something was seriously off. Tears were flowing at odd times — while I showered or while walking through the grocery store. Migraines and muscle pain meant that every day I was convinced I had some new disease, Googled it, found out about some other disease, Googled that, and sat sobbing in front of WebMD.com. By the end of the summer I had diagnosed myself with multiple kinds of cancer, arthritis, Crohn's disease, leprosy, Lyme disease, Norwalk virus, lupus, and the plague. This also led to my becoming a paranoid germaphobe, armed at all times with Purell and unable to shake hands with strangers or touch doorknobs without covering my hand with a sleeve. After a billion medical tests revealed nothing but arthritic hands and irritable bowel syndrome, my HMO finally caved and sent me to a psychologist. As soon as she met me, the shrink recommended I come twice a week.
Catholic saints know about depression. Some of them seem to have invented it. Saint Catherine of Siena went so deep into dark trances that she stopped eating, and eventually the only nourishment she took was drinking the infected pus of the sick patients she cared for (disgusting, I know). John of the Cross wrote a book called Dark Night of the Soul, and apparently had more than a few of those himself. Even Mother Teresa apparently got down in the dumps quite a lot and punished herself by wearing a spiked band around her thigh, to be tightened when she was tempted to sin. All the mystics had visions, went into trances, and suffered from seizures and mysterious bleeding wounds. Jesus himself cried quite often; you can see him breaking down frequently throughout the gospels, and he wandered off on his own when his ministry got to be too much. Priests and nuns will regale you with stories of people who had breakdowns in seminaries and convents. Going "over the wall" doesn't just mean somebody ran away from their vocation; it also means their vocation freaked them the hell out. Every time I hear one of these stories, I take consolation in knowing that my religion is a bit of a historical loony bin.
Things began to improve slightly with the doubled-up therapy; after all, if you're talking about your problems that often, at least a few of them ought to get resolved. And then after years of dealing with the stress of various relatives dropping dead, my husband Sage and I had a nuclear-scale fight. I'd had my head in books for so long that I'd lost the ability to focus on anything else, and he had been navigating years of mourning. I'd shoved him aside, and he'd burrowed into his sorrows and played music. We lived in the same house on different planets. Maybe artists shouldn't marry; maybe we should just have ridiculous affairs and make art about them and then marry doctors, but like the losers we are, we keep falling in love. The whole mess pointed out something obvious: I wanted to stay married, and I'd been hiding the real state of my marriage under the veneer that I didn't need any help from anyone, ever. Punk rock, gangster rap, and growing up in Oakland taught me to talk tough and act tough, and when people clear the sidewalk as I walk down the street, I know I look tough. But that's just cover for the mushy substance underneath.
My shrink navigated me through all this, and one afternoon she gazed at me in perplexed frustration. "You're angry now. Is there any place you can go where you calm down?" And I responded without thinking: "Church." At that point I was not regularly attending Mass. If anything, I was regularly avoiding it. But some conversations with friends eventually led to my admitting that I missed Catholicism. Most of the left-wing artist types I hung out with thought this was ludicrous. "What, are you going to start listening to Rush Limbaugh?" one of them asked. Another asked — seriously — if that meant I was going to bomb Planned Parenthood. But my friend Eli, who is an atheist Jew, the last person you'd imagine to be okay with religion and Christianity in particular, told me he understood. We've known each other since we were fourteen years old, goofing around at a summer theater camp, and we've been litgeek running buddies ever since. He was raised in a quasi-Jewish family, but he read Sartre in college and made up his mind that God did not exist, a belief he's stuck to ever since. When I told Eli that I'd been thinking about going back to the Church, he pulled on his beard and mused, "I'd totally go though the whole Jewish thing, bar mitzvah, you name it. But I don't believe in God." But I do. Oh, that's the trouble. I do.
That's what I told my shrink, and it felt weird to admit it, like blurting out that I believe in leprechauns. Under the tattoos, under the perpetual scowl, under the sheaves of poems and essays I've written beating around that particular burning bush, I have always believed in God, and not the gelatinous New Agey God who keeps cropping up in my "spiritual but not religious" generation's prose, but the biblical God. The Catholic God.
The narrative of a person finding faith in a crisis is a very old one. Even Paul, on the road to Damascus, was in a hot mess. As a persecutor of early Christians who rounded them up for mass slaughter, he knew he was despicable, but it took God putting scales over his eyes to make him understand how bad his behavior was. In the First Epistle to Timothy, he refers to himself as "the worst of sinners." It wasn't much of an exaggeration. Thomas Merton found faith when his parents died. Cast adrift, he partied with writers and knocked up a teenage girl before entering the monastery. Dorothy Day found it as a single mother after the breakup of a common-law marriage, when she was struggling to make enough money to survive and typing up Socialist essays for newspapers.
Today, we turn to shrinks, Prozac, yoga, drinking, television. Crises are supposed to come and go, and we're supposed to deal with them. But when it comes to a crisis because of a desire for faith, none of those solutions seemed to work for me. The contradictory desires for companionship and solitude that pushed me into panic and sorrow mirrored my problem with the phone: I've had a cell phone for years, but fewer than ten people have the number. I want to be able to call out, but I don't want anyone to reach me. And that's what happened to my marriage, after we'd already been together, mostly happily, for nearly a dozen years. I wanted a partner, but I wanted to be alone, to exercise the independence I'd had since childhood. At the same time, my desire for faith meant that I wanted a relationship with God in a community, but I didn't want it to make me into some sort of Bible-thumping right-wing moron. If you're going to admit you're a believer, and you swim in a sea of unbelief, where do you take this overflow of longing, this need?
In my case, you take it to a circle of sofas, in a church, where you're surrounded by seekers who may or may not be facing the same problems as you, but you're all lurching toward Easter like marathon runners stumbling to the tape.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Radical Reinvention"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Kaya Oakes.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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