18

My mom and I sat at the table, picking at a breakfast of hash browns and scrambled eggs while we coaxed Donald into saying some of his new words.

“You look awfully nice for a Sunday morning,” my mom said to Joe.

He walked into the kitchen in khaki slacks and a pressed white dress shirt. He was ready earlier than I’d expected, but I was excited to see how seriously he was taking this. “I don’t think the realtor would mind if you wore jeans,” I said. “But that’s great if you want to dress up to see the house!”

“I hear it’s gorgeous,” my mom said. “Jenny told me about the entertaining area in the back yard, how close it is to the lake. I’m so excited for you!”

Joe didn’t respond. He scraped hash brown scraps from the pan on the stove, downed half a glass of milk, then walked back toward our room. “Jen, can I talk to you?” he called from the hallway.

I knew what it was about before I even got out of the chair. He wasn’t dressed up to look at the house. He’d forgotten all about it. “We are going to see the Tarrytown house, right?” I whispered.

“What about church?”

The word was like a stress bomb, and its explosion made me want to go back to bed. “That wasn’t this weekend, was it?”

“Yes! You’ve been telling me for two weeks that we’d go today.”

“But you said we’d visit the house today!”

“I forgot what day it was. But this was planned first. Besides, I thought you wanted to do this, too.”

I did, sort of. I’d been reading up on Catholicism ever since our back-and-forth with Steve, and was pleasantly surprised by what I’d found. I even wanted to check out one of their services at some point. But none of that mattered compared to the house.

Before I could respond, Joe made a proposal. “The plans for church predate the plans to go to Tarrytown. And the house thing is moot anyway because we can’t afford it. But if you want to flip for it, I’ll go with that.”

“Tails.”

I followed Joe into the room, where he dug in the metal change container on top of the desk and pulled out a nickel. He flicked it up, grabbed the shimmering coin in the air, and slapped it onto the top of his left hand.

Heads. We were going to church.

* * *

I had been to church only a handful of times in my life. Sometimes I would tag along with friends’ families after Saturday spend-the-nights when we lived in Dallas, and I usually managed to be a bad influence. Before she met me, my friend Sandy used to study her children’s Bible during Sunday services. Then I suggested that it would be way cooler to conceal our Walkmen in our jean jackets so that we could listen to Bangles tapes during the service. The process of hiding a three-pound plastic device the size of a small unabridged dictionary proved to be more arduous than I’d imagined, but I walked away satisfied that we were the raddest kids in the entire First Methodist church that day.

Here at Saint Francis de Sales Catholic Church, we managed to make it through the front doors without any Atheist Detector sirens going off. But then there were bowls of water on pedestals near the front door. I stopped so suddenly that the man behind me almost ran into me. Was there an action item for me here?

Joe was already halfway down the main aisle and motioned for me to hurry up. He was carrying Donald, who was excitedly pointing to all the sights in this strange new building. I ran to catch up with them.

We were a few minutes early, and the room was more than half-full, with about three hundred people in attendance so far. Joe stopped in front of a pew on the left side of the sanctuary and motioned for me to go ahead. Just as I walked forward, I saw a family sit down across the aisle—but they did something first. They each knelt down and made a cross gesture while looking at the stage area at the front of the room.

Oh, no. Were we all supposed to do this? Would I seem rude if I didn’t? For a half second, I paused with the intent to do the kneel motion. But then my imagination flashed forward: I was lowering myself down, and just as my right knee touched the floor, someone shouted from the back pew: “SHE’S NOT CATHOLIC!” It turned out that this was a sacred ritual that becomes the most vile blasphemy when done by the uninitiated. Children gasped and pointed. An old lady fainted, dropping to the floor like a sandbag.

Joe seemed to find it amusing that I was frozen in the aisle, my eyes wide with panic. “It’s a pew,” he whispered. “You sit in it.” I dashed forward and sat down quickly, hoping nobody saw that I skipped the kneeling thing.

Shortly after we settled in, the service began. Music erupted from the choir area at the front of the room, a peppy song accompanied by tambourines and what sounded like a harmonica. Everyone around me stood in unison, and I scrambled to my feet. Then they all sat again, listened to something from the Bible, sang some really repetitive song, listened to the Bible again, then everyone stood for yet more Bible.

After we all returned to our seats, I became engrossed in a program I’d taken from a stack by the front door. It was as if I’d discovered the clandestine communications of a secret society. There was talk of “Eucharistic Adoration”, and they threw around acronyms like RE and RCIA and NFP. I tried to imagine what would go on at a Rosary group, or what a Liturgist would do.

Joe nudged me. “Get ready,” he whispered, picking up a folded collection of papers he’d brought with him. “Here comes the good part.” He’d been researching the early Church and had discovered that much of the writing of the first Christians had been preserved. Even better, it was all available for free online, a discovery which used up the last of my printer paper and half of an ink cartridge. This particular set of printouts contained excerpts from the letters of Justin Martyr, who was born around the year 100, and Hippolytus of Rome, born in 170, both of whom described the Christian church services of their time.

Joe flipped to a wrinkled page and pointed to an underlined passage from Justin Martyr: And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.

“The ‘memoirs’ of the apostles—this is from before the Bible existed!” Joe said. “They’re talking about the writing that later became the New Testament! Isn’t that amazing?”

Justin was a pagan philosopher who converted to Christianity, and in A.D. 150 he wrote to Emperor Antoninus Pius and to his son Verissimus the Philosopher (who would become Emperor Marcus Aurelius), explaining Christian practices and beliefs in hope of ending the rampant persecution of Christians.

Joe nudged me again and ran his finger under Justin’s words: There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water. A man and woman walked to the front of the sanctuary and handed a pitcher of wine and a basket of round bread wafers to the priest.

Everyone stood, and Joe took that as a cue to flip to another page, this one titled Hippolytus of Rome. He pointed to something Hippolytus had written around A.D. 215 describing Christian worship. I tried to imagine the appearance of this Hippolytus, deciding that I envisioned him to have a long beard and thinning hair on his head. Did he write during the day, with sunlight streaming over his paper, the sounds of people walking by the window, or in the silence of the night, using a quill by candlelight? I scanned over the part where he recorded that the leader of the ceremony would say The Lord be with you, and the people would answer, And with your spirit.

“The Lord be with you,” the priest called from the front of the room. I snapped my head up, disoriented.

“And also with you,” said the people around me in one voice.

Lift up your hearts, wrote Hippolytus.

We have them with the Lord, replied the Christians of two thousand years ago.

“Lift up your hearts,” I heard the priest say.

“We lift them up to the Lord,” everyone here in the church replied.

Let us give thanks to the Lord.

It is proper and just.

“Let us give thanks to the Lord,” the priest said.

“It is right to give him thanks and praise” came the response from all around me.

“Okay, that’s cool,” I whispered. I wasn’t thrilled to be here at church, but it was amazing to experience something so old. Some woman stood in a church on a Sunday in the year 200, and she heard the same words I was hearing now. Century after century lurched past, generations came and went, wars were fought, countries were created and dissolved, and here was I, almost two thousand years later, sharing an experience with that ancient woman. If we were to meet each other, somewhere outside of time, we would have something in common.

Everyone knelt, and Joe and I were forced to do the same because the people behind us needed to lean on the back of our seats. Joe now flipped to a page titled Ignatius of Antioch. It had a bunch of details about Communion that he seemed to find riveting, but I couldn’t get into it.

I turned back to the program. At the top of one of the pages was a guest column from a local nun—or, rather, a former nun. Mincing no words, she railed against the injustice of the all-male priesthood and spoke of the pain it caused her to know that she would never be able to administer the sacraments. Therefore, she was renouncing her status as a Catholic nun. She planned to join a Celtic Christian church, where she would begin the formation process for the priesthood.

Now Joe and I were both staring at papers. He was entranced by the writing of a first-century Christian, and I was equally taken with the writing of this nun. As I read her words, I readied myself for the inevitable reaction. I was prepared for the surge of enraged sympathy that would surely rush in any second now . . . but it never came.

I set the program down, straightened my back to kneel erect, and bowed my head to listen. The priest’s deep voice boomed from the speakers and filled the sanctuary: “This is my body, which will be given up for you.” I recognized those words from my Bible reading. Jesus said them only a few hours before his friend handed him over for execution. The discomfort that I had been so acutely aware of earlier in the ceremony faded away, and I became still, losing myself in the rhythm of this ancient ritual.

* * *

It was a mild November day, and after the service we stopped to let Donald toddle around the church grounds.

“What did you think?” Joe asked.

“It was good,” I said.

“You don’t seem very excited.” He motioned to the program. “Was it the nun’s thing in the bulletin?”

“Actually, no,” I said. I’d been thinking about it, and I realized why her argument didn’t resonate with me. She claimed that she was still a Christian, yet she was talking about the religion that said that God became a guy and hand-picked only other guys to spread his message. God could have come down as a woman, or as a hermaphrodite, or maybe manifested himself as a brother / sister team. But he didn’t. It seemed undeniably clear that, if Christianity spoke truth, God didn’t see the roles of men and women as being interchangeable.

There was a time when I would have looked at this setup as a blatantly unfair, but motherhood had slapped me upside the head with some perspective about gender and equality. There’s nothing like nine months of pregnancy and eighteen hours of childbirth to make you see that men and women are really, really different. Men can’t gestate and birth new human life. Women can. There’s a huge area of activity that the sexes do not share. Whether the author of life is God or simply Nature, it seemed to declare that people can have vastly different roles, unavailable to certain other people, and yet all be valued equally.

So the nun’s rallying cry fell flat for me, but there were other things that bothered me about Catholicism. “Look, the service was fine. Kind of neat, actually,” I said. “But I’m not sure that it was a better use of time than going to see the Tarrytown house. It’s not like we’d ever become Catholic.”

“Right. It does seem unlikely.”

“If nothing else, the anti-abortion stuff.”

“Yeah, speaking of which, I got this flier from the lobby just now. Check it out.” Joe produced a pamphlet from the bottom of his stack of papers. In big blue letters, the title said PRAY TO END ABORTION.

I stepped back. He couldn’t have shocked me more if he’d whipped out a baggie of crack cocaine. “What are you doing with that?”

“Just read it and see what you think.” He held it out for me.

I didn’t take it. “Are you kidding? Why?”

“Let’s face it: We’re both interested in Catholicism. I don’t know if it’ll all check out, but we’ve found some pretty interesting stuff. So we might as well hear them out about abortion.”

“I don’t plan to change my stance on that issue,” I snapped.

“Then you might as well stop looking into all of it right now. The beliefs that life is sacred and life begins in the womb go all the way to the core of Catholic doctrine.”

Though I didn’t show it, I winced at the idea of turning my back on Catholicism. I’d had mostly good experiences with this religion since I’d been looking into it. I loved chatting with my blog readers, and the more I considered what Steve G. pointed out about the issue of authority, the more the theory of a God-guided Church clicked in a way that really felt right. In fact, I’d been checking the mail every day for a new book I’d ordered on the subject. Yet, now that I thought about it, why was I wasting my time on a belief system I would never consider adopting?

“So you’re not even open to hearing the Catholic point of view?” Joe asked. He seemed to be genuinely perplexed.

“About abortion? No, I’m not. I’m not interested in the viewpoints of slavery advocates or Holocaust deniers either, in case you were wondering.”

Any positive feelings I might have had during the service were now forgotten. The nun got it wrong: If she wanted to reveal the Catholic Church’s true anti-woman side, she should have skipped the priestess stuff and talked about its stance against abortion.

“Can you throw that thing away?” I glared at the pamphlet.

Joe slipped it back in his stack of papers. “So you think abortion is always okay, all the time? Like the day before a woman’s due date? What if she’s in labor, but the baby isn’t out of the birth canal yet? Is it still her choice?”

I thought I detected a hint of dismissiveness when he said the word choice. I couldn’t believe this was happening. We had always agreed on this issue. A group of women in flowing skirts passed by, their cross necklaces gleaming in the sun as they bubbled about the service. I wanted to point at them and shout, “You did this!”

Joe frowned. “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that even though every other thing about this Church has checked out so far, you will not consider looking further because of one single issue?”

I started sputtering out an answer, but stopped myself. I wanted to get this right. I took in a breath, closed my eyes, and weighed each word before I spoke. “It’s not one random issue. This is about freedom. A person who does not have control over her body is not free.”

Joe was about to respond, but I held up my hand. “This Church says it gets its teachings from God, right? They also say that God is the source of goodness.”

Joe nodded cautiously. He was with me so far.

“If that’s all true,” I continued, “then the anti-abortion stance is not only offensive, but it’s illogical. An all-good God wouldn’t oppose freedom.”

After processing what I said, Joe seemed to agree. “That’s a fair point. There doesn’t seem to be internal consistency there.”

I was ready to wrap things up and pretend the discussion never happened, but Joe wasn’t done. “I think it’s worth just listening to the Catholic side of the story. I know we don’t agree. But they’ve had two thousand years to think about this, and they keep saying the same thing. Why not hear them out?”

I didn’t answer the question. This discussion was over, and we both knew it. Joe hoisted Donald up in his arms, and we walked back to the car in silence.