Why don’t you go to church?” Chris suggested one Sunday morning when June was a few months old and I was in a bad mood. Every weekend during June’s early babyhood Chris suggested I get out and do something. Why don’t you take a walk?” she would say. “Why don’t you get some coffee and read the paper?” She was really saying please take a break so you’ll stop being mad at me.
I didn’t want to stop being mad. I knew all about three deep breaths, about leaving the room or walking around the block, but I didn’t want to do any of those things. My anger, when it really got going, was enlivening. It was almost sexual in its power, in its license. When I got angry enough I would allow myself to say terrible things that I didn’t mean, but that were extraordinarily satisfying to say. I was reminded of something the Catholic writer Melissa Nussbaum once wrote about her young son when she told him that Jesus tells us not to hit people. “Jesus didn’t like to hit,” the little boy said. “But I do.”
I also didn’t want to take a break because I didn’t want Chris to think she was settling the score. I felt profoundly owed a debt of hours that Chris could never pay back, and I didn’t want her to think that by taking June for the afternoon or putting her down for a nap we would be even. It didn’t occur to me that “getting even” was not what Chris had in mind at all.
“Hey hon,” Chris said one Sunday morning when I had snapped at Grace for not putting away her shoes. “Would you please go to church?”
“You know West Cummington really isn’t enough for me,” I said, annoyed.
“It’s better than nothing,” she said.
“I’m not sure it is.”
But I went. I went to West Cummington most every Sunday morning when June was a baby, because by Sunday morning even I had to admit that I really, really wanted to get out of the house, and I didn’t so much care where I went. We had been members of West Cummington for as many years as we had lived in the hilltowns, and I knew that any sense of home I had was in large part because of the people I knew and loved at church. We were not typical hilltowners: we didn’t raise animals or tap our maple trees or pickle anything. I didn’t plan on homeschooling and I didn’t knit. But at West Cummington those things didn’t matter. We all drove the same rutted roads to that church on the hill; the same snow and mud covered the boots of everyone who pulled open the tall wooden door to the sanctuary on Sunday mornings.
June was usually sleepy when the service started at nine thirty, so I stood in the back of the sanctuary during announcements and the call to worship, shushing her, two-stepping her to sleep in the sling. If she didn’t settle quickly, I slipped out the back door and walked along the ledge to the road until she settled, not worrying that she wouldn’t. I could manage her in a way I hadn’t been able to manage Grace; I could manage June alone in a way I could not yet manage both of them together. Motherhood expanded me the first time and again the second, so that when I was alone with June I felt a near-thrilling excess of competence.
Church was a welcome escape in those early months with June, a place to hear a sermon and sing shape-note hymns, to see people I loved. A place where June’s slurpy nursing and my yoga pants were welcome. I didn’t ask much more of those Sunday mornings. During moments of silence or prayers for the people, I didn’t work to quiet my mind; I didn’t talk to God. I kissed the top of June’s warm head, I paged through the hymnal. I looked out the window at the greening hillside, the apple trees, the narrow road.
June was baptized in early summer, when she was three months old. A congregant who was pregnant with her own second child sang “Down by the River to Pray” and Steve doused June’s head with creek water, as he had doused Grace’s nearly four years before. He read from To Kill a Mockingbird because June’s middle name was Harper, and he preached to everyone about the burdens and glories of parenthood. During the baptism he asked, “By what name will this child be known?” and Grace, who was in my arms, said, “Junebug.” I thanked God for the glories of two daughters, of sisters. I did not think of Father Dowling.
St. Rumi’s was Chris’s nickname for West Cummington, and it was an apt one. West Cummington was ecumenical to its core; Steve sought and plumbed connections between texts, across continents, languages, and centuries. And he did it with an integrity that I could see even when it annoyed me, even when I hungered for him to simply talk about Jesus. On the seemingly rare occasions when he did, just the word coming out of his mouth stirred me—stirred in me, and I would startle, I would shift my attention from the window, from June’s body. Jesus. I would feel alive and alone, in the best possible way. I would be reminded that I was a believer, although more than even that I would be reminded that I was seen, and I was loved.
There was something else that stirred me during those mornings in church, something that turned my attention away from the view, and from June. After the sermon and the offering Steve led the congregation in prayer, which was a solemn few moments of petition when people were invited to say aloud the names of people who were “sick, suffering, or numb, in body, mind, or spirit.” Some weeks only a few people whispered a name or two, other weeks the litany was long. I knew many of the people whose names were called out, although I often did not know of their troubles. Every week I whispered Chris’s name. Not because she was sick, suffering, or numb, but because when I thought of God’s attention, of God’s loving hand, I thought of Chris. I think now what I was saying when I whispered her name was, please turn me toward her, because I can’t seem to turn toward her myself.
All summer, June and I spent Sunday mornings at West Cummington. Sometimes I stood in the back with another mother, her baby also in a sling. We shared a hymnal and whispered through the service like schoolgirls, but by Labor Day, June could no longer fall asleep in my arms at church. She needed a nap in her crib, and when she woke she needed to make noise and eat mashed avocados. So I started leaving her at home with Chris and Grace and going to church by myself. It should have been a luxury to go without June, and sometimes it was. But going without her meant that she and her sister were mine for the rest of the day. And even harder than cashing in all my child-free time was sitting alone in the pew without a head to kiss, a tiny slinged backside to pat. When I was there with June I was worshipping her—her tiny, quiet body, her full lips pressed against my chest.
But when I wasn’t in church with June I wanted church to be more, to do more. I wanted the Eucharist and I wanted Jesus, every single week. I wanted to emerge from church feeling well traveled, rinsed clean. But West Cummington could only be what it had always been: a modest country church filled with my neighbors. “Today I saw God in the face of a kitten,” a woman with a brusque voice and a gray ponytail announced on one of the first Sundays Chris and I went to West Cummington together. We laughed for years about that line, and while no one ever said anything quite so absurd again, church was still filled with the news and noise of our small town, and there was no pageantry there. Nor was there meant to be: the point of that Sunday morning gathering was not to exalt but rather to pause and take notice of gratitude and grief, or of the complicated ordinary that sleeps between. And I could do that when there was a baby in my arms, but I couldn’t do it without her. So sometime during the winter before June turned one I stopped going to church. An old longing began to bloom again, a longing that at the time I might have said was a longing for God. But I believe now that it was really more than that. It was grief for someone I did not, and would not now become.
A few weeks after June’s first birthday, we left her with a babysitter and drove to Worcester for Chris’s niece’s first communion. The church was familiar to me now: after Chris’s grandparents’ funerals all those years ago we had returned together several times. First for her niece’s baptism, a quiet service for which the family stood gathered around the baptismal font, all of us trying not to laugh as the baby blew spit bubbles down her white gown while the priest asked her godparents to guide her in her renunciation of Satan. And we had also come for our nephew’s first communion. I spent most of the service at the preschool playground with a wily, eighteen-month-old Grace. I brought her into the sanctuary’s entryway during the communion rites so I could watch, but I became distracted by an antichoice poster that hung on the wall near the door. “Stop the killing of innocent babies,” it said. I took a marker out of Grace’s bag of toys and added “IN IRAQ!!!” in large block letters.
As we were leaving, I showed Chris. “I did that,” I whispered, pointing to the poster. “Nice,” she whispered back. I felt a surge of connection to her then, which pleased me, because otherwise we were at odds in church, over the Church, although we never spoke of it. See, I was saying to her then, I agree with you. Mostly.
At our niece’s first communion, the sanctuary was packed with families, squirming babies in tights with bows taped to their heads, fathers with video cameras. Grace couldn’t believe the girls’ dresses, their veils. “Why does it look like they’re getting married?” she asked.
“Bride of Christ,” Chris whispered, rolling her eyes. I gave her a look.
“They’re just really dressed up,” I said. “It’s a very special occasion. You don’t have to wear a veil.”
“I did,” Chris said. Grace and I both ignored her.
“Do I get to wear one to Steve’s church?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “We don’t really do first communion. You can take communion whenever you want.”
West Cummington was the only church Grace had known, and she was accustomed to Steve, in his Carhartts and sandals and, on special occasions, linen sports coat. She was accustomed to white walls and two candles and a vase of flowers from someone’s garden, and she certainly had never seen Jesus hanging on the cross, although she didn’t mention him, and I didn’t point him out.
I liked being back in that church, although I hardly felt like I was in church. The service was busy and distracting, lots of chatting between pews, leaning up or back to talk with a cousin or old friend in a loud whisper, which I—now a beloved member of the family—thoroughly enjoyed. But it didn’t leave much time to think about where I was, how I felt being in a Catholic church after all this time. And then it was time for communion, and I didn’t know what to do. I hesitated, and when it came time for the people in our pew to join the line, I sat back, gave them space to pass by me.
Later Grace asked me why I didn’t go up for communion. “Mati told me she wouldn’t go, but you would. But then you didn’t.”
“Oh,” I said, trying not to sound as surprised, as flustered as I was. “Not this time.” It was a dismissive answer, but what else could I say? Chris had told Grace I would receive communion? Had I known that, had I known her expectation, her allowance for me, I would have gone up. But why did I need her permission? Why was it for her to decide if my involvement in the Church—however occasional, however peripheral—was acceptable, was not a threat to our marriage? Over the past several years I had packed away most of the relics of my Catholicism. I kept my grandmother’s rosary beads, but I let Grace wear them with her dress-up clothes. I read Andre Dubus and Flannery O’Connor, but not Thomas Merton. I had devised a sort of calculus whereby I allowed just enough Catholicism into my consciousness to keep me from acknowledging how much of it I had lost.
A few days after the service in Worcester, we were at the kitchen counter, reading the paper. Chris was reading aloud to me about something the Church had done or said. I don’t remember what it was, perhaps a statement against gay marriage or a condemnation of a secretly ordained female priest. Or maybe it was something less serious, like a pair of four-hundred-dollar Prada shoes owned by the pope. (Chris was constantly reporting to me on the antics of the pope. I couldn’t seem to make her understand that he meant nothing to me.)
“I’m sorry,” she said—although we both knew that she was not—“but I can’t understand how anyone could be a part of club based on bigotry and exclusion. How could anyone belong to a church that says her life is a sin?”
I knew Chris well enough to know that this was not so much an invitation to conversation as it was an inquisition. Did I feel this way? Was I going to join her in full renunciation of the Church? Would I, once and for all, wash my hands of these men and their bigotry, their cowardice?
Instead I asked her a question. “Does it ever make you sad,” I asked, “that you gave it up?” And before she could answer, I asked what was, for me, the real question. “Do you ever miss it?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t miss anything about it.”
And then I knew that when we had these conversations we were not talking about the same thing, we were not talking about the same thing at all.
But this was what I did not yet understand: if we weren’t talking about belief, if we weren’t talking about God, it wasn’t because of Chris. It was because of me. She would have talked about belief with me, if I had the courage to talk about it. But I didn’t even have the vocabulary. Not anymore. I wanted to fault her for her focus on the Church’s exclusionary policies, but in truth we were both reacting to them. She was fighting, and I was giving up. It was easier for me to miss God and the Church than it was to think that I—like all gay people—had been hurt by a straight person who saw my desires as incompatible with a faithful life. And because I couldn’t acknowledge that prejudice I couldn’t move past it, or perhaps I should say I couldn’t move back from it, back to the months of early belief and the happiness it brought me. It was easier for me to live without God than it was to admit my gayness, my otherness, and the way it had ushered me out of the world of ease and privilege I had been born into. We talked about the Church because I couldn’t talk about God; we talked about the pope because I couldn’t talk about Hector. We talked about four-hundred-dollar shoes because I could not say to Chris, “Look: I loved that crazy Church, I loved those wild ideas about God, and I gave them up because I also wanted you.”