The best-known demilitarized zone in the world divides the Korean Peninsula roughly in half between North Korea and South Korea. The July 1953 armistice agreement established the approximately four-kilometer-wide buffer and rules for the zone’s demilitarization. The two opposing sides, however, are heavily militarized. Each country can patrol all they want within their side of the DMZ, but neither side may cross the military demarcation line, or MDL, which was the actual war front when the agreement was signed. The DMZ is a profoundly uneasy monument to truce, a pile of dried-out wood susceptible to the slightest spark.
But there is a bridge: It’s called the “Bridge of No Return.” It’s the only way across. It is where prisoner exchanges take place.
There is an involuntary nature preserve within the DMZ, a sort of accidental park that has evolved over the years of existing as a no-man’s-land into a place where endangered plants, animals, birds and marine species thrive. Not surprisingly, this has happened mainly due to the lack of human intervention. The area includes mountains and prairies and lakes. Environmentalists would like to turn it into a peace park, a U.N.-protected World Heritage Site, but this remains a pipe dream. How odd and good that in such close proximity to seriously fortified military borders, nature has managed a victory over man.
I think about what it would be like to cross the Bridge of No Return as I sit uneasily, feeling close to paralyzed, in a metaphorical place I have named the Catholic DMZ. I am a woman at war within myself, in sight of two well-armed realities, my faith life suspended in the center. I think of the two sides of this spiritual DMZ as Creed and Culture.
The Creed fortification on one side of the line of demarcation is exactly that: It is everything I say I believe in when I say the Apostles’ Creed. I was born into and nurtured by this Creed my whole life. It is simple. It is succinct. It is direct. I have always loved the Easter tradition of responding “I do” as a community to the Creed presented in the form of questions, to remind us of the rite of our baptism: Do you reject Satan, and all his works, and sin, and the glamor of evil? Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth? Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting?
I do.
I have always felt a little buzz of assent when the priest concludes our holy interrogation with the conviction, “This is our faith.” Yes, I think. This is our faith. We are indeed proud to profess it.
It’s the Culture embattlement on the opposite side of the Catholic DMZ that repels me. At the moment, the image of American Catholicism is a politically charged steamroller. We don’t come across as very loving or inclusive or merciful. For example, how do I support a newly elected, newly converted vice president who visibly squirms and smirks at a prayer service when the presider calls to mind frightened L.G.B.T.Q. children? Or what about the various bishops and archbishops who fire L.G.B.T.Q. teachers or musicians?
Lest I get fixated on this small and marginalized community, which of course I am because I am the mother of a trans child, how do I excuse that same Catholic politician who tells outrageous lies about immigrants eating pets, or who accuses the U.S. bishops of being driven by financial motives when they remind Catholics of their call to care for migrants at the border? The many Catholics who enthusiastically support the death penalty or who chant cruel deportation slogans live deep in this Culture that I want no part of. I see little trace of Jesus’ directives to feed the hungry and care for the poor, much less to welcome the stranger and visit the prisoner. I see us Catholic women treated as second-class creations of God as we’re told to be patient, to not force change on the institutional church.
There’s my rant.
It has taken some time, but my entire family has exited the church, some because they cannot abide the clergy sexual abuse scandal and the cover-ups, some because they want to stand in solidarity with their trans sibling, some because they have found a more welcoming place to worship, some because they are the kid who was made to feel sinful and condemned by hapless youth ministers, who believed God must have made a mistake when creating them. I understand my family members’ decisions to leave, even as my Catholic heart is riddled with cracks. I am the last one clinging to my church of origin.
For now, I am hunkered down in the DMZ, staying motionless to avoid the land mines, but still drawn to the Creed’s vesper light. But this is no peace park. I do not know how long I can remain here, sheltered from Culture’s bullets. To crawl over to Creed’s side and lie low seems prudent. But to ignore the words and deeds of Culture seems untenable, requiring a conscience on perpetual pause. If I cross the Bridge of No Return to live safely and silently within the cover of the Creed, am I not assenting to Culture’s wrongs with my silence? “To be silent is to be complicit,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. He was right. He died for being right. But his words have not died.
I feel like I have run out of words, a strange admission for a writer. When I pray these days, I mostly listen. My ears are open, Lord. Speak: Your servant longs to hear that still small voice.
