A big part of being a child is being dragged against your will to various locations. You’re dragged to piano practice; you’re dragged to Christmas parties at the home of family friends; you’re dragged to your Great Aunt Miriam’s house where everything is covered in plastic and it smells weird. But the worst part of these involuntary outings is that you, the child, are forced to pretend you’re happy to be there. Right before your parents shove you over the threshold of Great Aunt Miriam’s house, they tell you to “be nice and behave” or else there will be “no American Idol tonight.”
But Catholic Mass was different. The beauty of being there as a child was that I didn’t have to pretend I was having a good time. That’s not what Mass was about. Everyone in the church, from the altar boys to the organ player, wore faces so grim they looked like Simon Cowell.
During one particularly tedious Mass I attended as a 7-year-old, I leaned over to my father and whispered, “I don’t want to be here.” Without missing a beat, my father pointed to the wooden crucifix and asked, “Do you think he wants to be here?”
And yet I came to hold a begrudging respect for Catholicism and its church. Little did I know, this was merely the beginning of my lifelong, on-again off-again, relationship with the world’s largest sect of Christianity.
Growing up Catholic
Growing up, I never considered being Catholic a large part of my identity. It was a part of my life, sure, but it was off to the side. It was never my center. I attended public school five days a week and faith formation classes once a week: Sunday mornings from 10:30 a.m. until 12:00 p.m. Besides the required holidays, my family attended Mass sporadically, based largely on whether or not my father thought it had been “too long since we went to church.”
My father, a practicing Catholic, and my mother, a devout atheist, are linked by their distaste for the institutional elements of the Catholic Church and their willingness to criticize them. For my father, no nit is too small to pick when it comes to the Catholic Church. I witnessed this, firsthand, the last time I attended Mass with him. The moment the priest ended his Christmas sermon, my father turned to me and stated, “Six minutes, 44 seconds. He could get it under six.” I looked down and in his lap sat his iPhone, stopwatch app open. Yes, he had timed the sermon.
It’s not just local priests with lengthy rhetoric who should fear my father. He’ll go after the big brass just as well! My father believes both in God and in the incompetence of the church hierarchy. He is, however, a fan of Pope Francis and his “message of mercy, protecting the environment, and being open and welcoming to the gay community.” My dad once sent me an email in which he asserted, “A true Irish Catholic should be fighting the bishops every step of the way and helping Francis.”
My father’s aversion toward Catholic authority makes sense considering his religious upbringing. My Gramere was an Irish immigrant from Omagh, Northern Ireland, where she grew up as one of 10 children. She was a strict, no-nonsense, Irish Catholic woman. My father had to say his prayers every morning, oftentimes in front of his classmates who picked him up on their way to school. My grandparents then sent my father to an all-boys Catholic boarding school in Rome, Italy. If you received detention there, you spent your weekend building the school’s newest stone wall.
By comparison, I think I received a much more well-rounded Catholic education. My parents had me attend weekly Catholic education classes, yet encouraged me to question and even outright challenge the church’s teachings. As expected, I inherited my father’s Irish penchant for rebellion and became the devil’s advocate of my class. I would ask questions such as, “Why can’t women be priests?” or “Why are all of the apostles men?”
But despite my frequent class disruptions, I was still on board with Catholicism as a whole. I believed in God, I believed in Jesus Christ, I believed in heaven and hell. I believed in all these things in the most literal sense. And I liked believing in them.
Asking Questions
To my atheist mother’s credit, she never rained on our Catholic parade; she let us believe in the things we were taught. When I turned 10 years old, I started asking about her religious views. One thing to know about my mother is that when asked a direct question, she can be a very direct woman.
I have a flashbulb memory of me lying next to my mom in her bed, which I preferred since it had a puffy duvet. I don’t know how it came up, but I asked her if she believed in heaven. She offered a one word reply, “No.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I think heaven is a place people made up because they’re too scared to die,” she replied.
“But then what do you think happens to us after we die?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you scared to die?”
“No,” she laughed, “It happens to everyone. It’s natural.”
I’m not sure what rattled me more, the fact that my mother appeared completely unafraid of eternal oblivion or the fact that her reasoning behind not believing in heaven actually made sense to me. I began questioning my faith in bigger ways. The more I thought about it, the more I started to swing in my mother’s direction.
By the time I was 13 years old, I had disavowed religion as a whole, a rite of passage for anyone raised Catholic. I no longer found satisfaction in challenging the church’s teachings; instead, I found what I felt was a rather righteous anger. When you keep asking the same questions and keep getting the same underdeveloped answers, you become extremely frustrated. And I was tired of being angry. And I didn’t believe in God anymore. And I didn’t believe in heaven or hell. And I didn’t want to be Catholic.
And so, in my final year of religious education, I told my dad that I didn’t want to be confirmed.
My dad actually took the news pretty well. At the very least, I think he was impressed with how seriously I was taking religion. When I told him that I didn’t believe in God, he simply replied, “Everyone has their own spiritual journey” and swiveled his office chair around to continue watching “Rudy.” When my dad broke the news to Sister Roberta, the nun in charge of the school, she simply replied, “Well…maybe she’ll come around.” Even though I had adamantly sworn off the church, the lifelong Catholics knew it wouldn’t be the end for me and this very sticky religion.
Seeing the Beauty
The first chink in my atheist armor occurred when my family bravely crossed the Atlantic to attend my dad’s 50th high school reunion in Rome. My dad’s old school chum, Arturo, had scheduled our tour of the eternal city down to the minute. For a group of 65-year-old men, they sure could handle themselves on a walking tour.
By day six of our Roman holiday, I had become pretty used to seeing beautiful, awe-inspiring things. But what I wasn’t used to was the feeling I got whenever we visited a church. I specifically remember St. Peter’s Basilica. Everywhere I turned was beautiful and gold and filled with light. I looked up at the ceiling and it looked like heaven. I felt so small— the good kind of small—the kind that makes you feel connected to all the other small humans, even the ones that came before you. I remember thinking that I wasn’t just beholding beauty, I was beholding goodness.
I didn’t think the angels I saw on the ceiling that day were literally real, but the feeling I had when I looked at them was. And no amount of logical reasoning could make me deny that. Even still, I chalked my momentary brush with the divine as a logical side effect of viewing beautiful architecture. I was still an adamant atheist.
But identifying as an atheist doesn’t necessarily preclude you from also identifying as Irish Catholic. When you’re raised within a specific ethnic-religious subgroup, it is nearly impossible to detach yourself from that culture. If you brought up Great Britain in front of my Gramere, who grew up Catholic in the Protestant-controlled North, she would pull out her iconic phrase, “800 years of British oppression over the Irish!”
My atheism phase continued until the Easter of my freshman year of college. It was the first religious holiday I wouldn’t be spending with my family. At long last, I wouldn’t be forced to attend Easter Mass. I had finally wriggled my way out of Catholicism’s iron grip.
Or so I thought.
An Easter Epiphany
As Easter neared, I started to feel extremely uneasy at the thought of not attending Mass. I don’t know how to explain it other than saying it just felt wrong—the kind of wrong you feel in the pit of your stomach. I mean, what else would I do with that Sunday? My dad was also sweetening the pot by offering a $50 Easter brunch stipend to those of his children who attended Mass and sent picture proof in the family group chat.
As I walked to the church in my pink pastel dress, I told myself that I was only going to Mass for the money. After all, who among us would turn down a free brunch?
I arrived at Mass 15 minutes early and managed to secure myself a seat behind a large pole that obstructed about half of the altar. By the time the Mass started, the church had become standing room only.
Though I wasn’t sitting in a grand cathedral or ancient chapel, that same sense of smallness washed over me again. I thought I didn’t believe in the prayers I was reciting, but when I said the words in unison with the congregation I felt something. Was it faith? I’m not sure if that’s the right word. I’m not sure the feeling actually has a word.
There is a theory within the ecological community that the redwood trees are actually one, single organism. From the human perspective, each tree seems to be its own individual entity. But when you look beneath the soil, you see that the trees on the edge of the Redwood Forest are feeding nutrients to the trees in the center through their intricately connected root system.
Sitting in church that day, I felt like a redwood tree, like I was connected to something larger and more important than myself, something beautiful and fundamentally good.
I'm in my mid-20s now, and since that day I haven’t identified as atheist. Not because I have certainty about the existence of God, but because I am certain I believe in his message: that we aren’t here on earth for ourselves; we are here for one other. And that the way we love each other connects us and creates something more, something divine. In 1 Cor 13:13, the passage that you may recognize from every wedding ever, the text reads, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” If I believe in one thing, it is this.
