Six Stages of an Ex-Catholic
By Alex Dodt
I. Sacrilege
“I stole Jesus,” Stephanie whispered, her smirk pleading for a reaction. I glanced at our father to make sure he hadn’t overheard, then back at Stephanie, my eyes widening.
“The Jesus cracker,” she said, louder this time, cracking open her purse to reveal the holy communion wafer sandwiched between her wallet and a mini can of mace.
According to Catholic Canon Law, sacrilege—the violation of a sacred object—is a mortal sin and irreverence toward the Body of Christ represented by the Holy Eucharist is the worst of all sacrileges. In the Old Law, this act was punishable by death. Failure to repent before death would result in eternal damnation.
Our father turned to us with a look that said he hadn’t heard but would like to. Stephanie closed her purse. As we sat motionless, listening to the priest’s closing blessing, a joke came to me with the shock I imagine accompanies divine revelation in the mind of an unreformed sinner. I peered at Stephanie as though she may have slid the joke in my ear.
Today, lapsed, an outsider, I understand sacrilege like a scientist’s equations understand deep space, understand the rush I felt when Stephanie opened her purse for the fear it concealed, but then, only fourteen, my grasp of God’s will was not much more than a flimsy extension of my grasp of our father’s house rules—no Cs on your report card, no stupid questions, be home by 8:30—and all I believed with total confidence was that there was always time to repent.
While Stephanie was cramming the Holy Eucharist in her purse, I was politely accepting it, opening my palm for the priest to place it in, feeling the yellow crisp on my tongue and waiting for it to dissolve like medicine. I was in high school then, had drank my first beer, had started talking back to teachers and mall security guards, but the fear of God lingered, dwindling to embers during the week of school work and family dinners around the TV but stoked enough each Sunday you could feel it on my breath when I repeated after the priest, “May peace be with you.”
Stephanie was two years older and I followed her everywhere, into punk rock and radical politics that scared our parents, into vegetarianism and adopting a small dog, into abruptly moving out and pursuing an art school dream, into mortal sin and atheism.
Sometimes, like a child in an aquarium, I believed I was in charge of our exploration, pulling her along through the tunnels of glass, pointing out the mysterious creatures circling us, the giant grouper fish lurking near the artificial coral reef, the stingrays concealing their poisonous bodies on the sandy bottom, the tiger shark knifing across the surface overhead just beyond our reach, and looking back each time to make sure Stephanie was seeing what I saw, not realizing that she still held me by the hand.
I never shared the joke with her that night. I couldn’t right then, our father two feet away with his ears perked up, our grandmother on the altar singing in the church choir, and I never had the chance after mass, the whole family crowded around our grandmother’s living room, Stephanie and I falling asleep on her corduroy couch with cups of hot chocolate squeezed between our legs. The next morning, we were back to grumpy teenagers dragging ourselves to school in a truce of silence.
She would have loved it though. She loved my bad jokes. I would have leaned over, opened her purse, and whispered in Jesus’s tiny voice, “Damn, it’s hot as hell!” Stephanie’s projectile laugh would have had us both grounded. Or maybe she would have rolled her eyes and called me stupid.
I’m no longer sure. Her hand slipped from mine and when I turned around to find her she was gone. I try to remember a time that I made her laugh so I can have a sound to search for in the crowd, but I only hear the voices of strangers shuffling past. I backtrack through long corridors toward what I believe is home, hands pressed against cold glass, seeing only monsters.
II. Heresy
On the back of a napkin stamped with the circular bottom of my chocolate fudge cone, we built ourselves a new religion. “Rule #1,” Stephanie said, then wrote “no Pope.” I peeked over the booth toward the door as it opened and another customer entered.
“I hate organized religion,” I said, picking up the pen. Stephanie slid the napkin toward me. “Rule #2,” I said, then wrote “no saints.” Stephanie dipped a plastic spoon into the remains of her banana split and nodded.
According to Catholic Canon Law, heresy—the obstinate denial or doubt of a divine truth—is a mortal sin that denies the fundamental unity of faith. In the Old Law, this act was punishable by death. Failure to repent before death would result in eternal damnation.
We had another hour to kill before we could return home and tell our parents that the “Teen Life” church service had been great, then rush down the hall to our bedrooms which sat across from each other, her door covered by a Billy Idol poster, mine blank but always closed, so we kept writing, building ourselves a new faith until ink bled through the napkin, until we had a church so disorganized we could carry it in our pockets like fistfuls of sand.
After the Pope and the saints, we excommunicated the Bergmans who lived two houses down and knelt in the pew in front of us each Sunday like gift shop Christs. Then, it was the miracles, the apostles, the pious men and their gold-embroidered robes. There would be no requirement to get dressed up in our church, which would have no church, no incense-clouded atrium, no stained-glass Marys.
When it was time to go home, the napkin was out of empty space.
“What do you believe?” I asked, turning over the napkin, searching for what we had left of God.
“I don’t know,” is what Stephanie’s shoulders indicated, but she said nothing as she put the pen back in her purse. I crumpled the napkin and squeezed it into a tiny ball. We drove home with the windows down, The Clash turned up louder than thought, our new faith smudging into an untranslatable mess in my fist, the word God becoming sin.
III. Blasphemy
Pointing her camera like a weapon, Stephanie directed us to move closer to the darkened church door, encouraging me to pull down the straps of my bra to reveal more shoulder and Monty to hike up his skirt to show more thigh. A car drove by slowly but kept going.
“On three, say, ‘Fuck you!’” Stephanie shouted, as the flash illuminated our afternoon drag show.
According to Catholic Canon Law, blasphemy—speaking or acting abusively against God—is a mortal sin and the gravest that may be committed against religion. In the Old Law, this act was punishable by death. Failure to repent before death would result in eternal damnation.
The bra I wore was actually Stephanie’s and so was Monty’s skirt and the dress that Juan had on and the faux feather boa draped around Caleb’s scrawny shoulders. The photo shoot was her idea too, concocted minutes earlier as the five of us sat in her bedroom while her newly-strawberried hair dried in the window light, her pink-stained fingers tracing in the air a portrait of her plan.
There was one car in the church parking lot, but if anyone was inside, they never showed themselves. Maybe no one noticed. Or maybe they recognized Stephanie and I from the cover of our church’s newsletter five years before when we were named Family of the Year, our two younger siblings crouching in the center of the photo, Stephanie and I flanking them, our hands on their shoulders, our parents on the outside edges, their arms linked around all four of us.
Two more cars drove by as we pranced around the church, but no one stopped or even honked. Stephanie led us through a series of shots like they were directed at God. Monty and I on the front lawn, writhing in the grass. Juan and Caleb kissing each other by the main entrance. Monty drinking water suggestively from the church’s hose. Juan and Monty strutting down the catwalk in polka dot pants. Finally, the four of us linking arms, performing a can-can kick line in front of the Welcome Visitors sign.
IV. Misdemeanor Criminal Damage
The tallest window in the church was at least ten feet tall and when I hit it glass fell on me like a flood. I was wearing combat boots, black jeans, and a sweatshirt with the hood up, but in my instinct to protect myself from a shower of glass, I raised my hands over my head, exposing the only unprotected part of my body.
“Holy shit,” Stephanie said, as we peeled out of the church parking lot in our mother’s minivan that we had promised to have home by 10:00. In the back seat, Monty and Juan started laughing. A line of blood trickled from my left hand.
According to the United States Code, Title 18, section 247, misdemeanor criminal damage is prosecuted zealously when the damage is directed against houses of worship. This act is punishable by imprisonment for up to three years. Failure to admit guilt before seven years have passed will result in no legal consequences as the statute of limitations for prosecution will have expired.
In under a minute, we had smashed three windows and Juan pissed in the church’s azalea bushes. Afterwards, we drove around aimlessly for a couple hours, tipping over a port-a-potty at the mall and eating shakes and fries at a local drive-thru.
The church we damaged wasn’t one we had any connection to. We didn’t drive by again for months and when we did the church appeared as if nothing had happened.
V. Apostasy
The last time it came time for holy communion it was Christmas Eve and Stephanie and I didn’t take part, bending our legs beneath the pew as everyone in our row shuffled past. Neither of us had been to church in years. Our father invited us that night like we were tourists, no hope of a conversion, just the chance to see our grandmother sing in the choir one last time. The two of us sat through communion in silence, alone in our row.
According to Catholic Canon Law, apostasy—the complete abandonment of the Christian faith—is a mortal sin with no hope of pardon. In the Old Law, this act was punishable by death. Forgiveness of apostasy is left to God alone.
Departures become less clear in hindsight. A thousand moments could qualify. How to measure belief’s erosion? Even after smashing those windows, I attended church for two more years. Like a dream, I can’t recount when faith began or ended, only that it had. The loss of faith precedes the abandonment as the death of love precedes the break up. Or maybe love remains, but in another form, less potent, spoken only in a dead language.
As we sat together in silence that night, Stephanie reached for her purse. I didn’t make a joke. I didn’t even think of one this time, not when she was shuffling through her purse, not when our father returned from receiving communion to sit next to us once more, not when she finally pulled from her purse a pack of gum, taking one stick for herself and holding another up for my consideration, the long, aluminum body of the wrapper nearly reflective in the inquisitive church skylights, an offering of solidarity, or commiseration for boredom, which I took in my palm and devoured.
VI. Judgment
“It looks like we’re praying,” I said as I held Stephanie’s left hand with my left and fed her ice chips from a Styrofoam cup with my right.
This was the last conversation we had. In one week she would be taken off life support. We didn’t know that at the time, except in the way families who have spent months trading turns sleeping in the ICU know, the mystifying reports and facial expressions of nurses and doctors and evening security guards congealing into the sense of possibility necessary to continue while still providing enough clues that when the time comes you look back and see it was obvious.
According to Catholic Canon Law, those who die without accepting the truth of the Catholic faith can only achieve salvation if their ignorance of God could not have been removed with reasonable diligence.
What is reasonable? What is diligence? We tried to know Truth. The church told us that the priests who molested altar boys were men of God, that our loving, godless friends were sinners. On the news, faith was the people picketing soldiers’ funerals, the president citing God’s will for war crimes, the politicians ensuring our little brother would have to travel cross-country to see his love recognized by law.
What is there to repent?
Dying on the cross, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” If Pontius Pilate and the chief priests were ignorant enough to still warrant God’s grace, what about a blasphemous apostate who called the Body of Christ “the Jesus cracker” and smuggled it home in her purse to toss in the trash like an old stick of gum?
The Second Vatican Council says that nonbelievers can still be saved. It must say that. It says that nonbelievers can still be saved if they lived in accordance with God’s will “through the dictates of their own conscience.”
I will not tell you about Stephanie’s conscience.
I will not tell you how her laugh could undress a stranger’s humiliation like a lover. I will not tell you how ferociously she guarded her friends’ secrets. I will not tell you about watching from the passenger seat as she carried a wounded animal across the empty highway and knelt beside its body in the high brush.
I am not pleading for her to be saved.
Emptying her closet last week, I came across a folder of essays Stephanie wrote in college. In one of them, she had to respond to the question: “Suppose there was a computer that had all knowledge and you may ask it one question; what would you ask and why?” She would have been nineteen, more than halfway through her life, when she wrote her response.
I could ask the computer, “Is there a God?” or “What is our purpose?” My first instinct is to say that I have already decided those questions for myself and it is difficult to imagine the computer giving me an answer that would improve anything.
After Stephanie died, I went to church for the first time since our final Christmas Eve mass. I snuck in just before opening processional, slouching into the back pew of the same building where we were baptized, confirmed, and received communion for the first time, the three sacraments making us eligible for eternal life.
I envied the people I saw, sturdied, as they appeared to be, by belief. By comparison, my ways of making sense felt impotent. We have one life, living it well matters. It was too ridiculous to even say aloud. Those who still believe, they’ve got it right, I thought, as though belief were a wager. When my brother told me that our father had stopped praying at dinner or going to mass, I was confused. “Dad is angry at God,” my brother said, matter-of-factly. I wondered how that was possible, how everything could be broken at once.
Stephanie would make fun of me for going back to church, even if only one time. She never wavered, as far as I could tell. I might not tell her that I had gone. If she were alive, I wouldn’t have to.
I didn’t stay for the whole mass. I had a headache and everything began sounding garbled, the priest and his sermon, the choir’s hallelujahs, the saints marbled in relief. I tried to pay attention, to listen for a clue, but soon got up and left, annoyed, like a man bent before a microscope, squinting intently, unable to forget the body.
I could ask, “What happens when we die?” But would I want to know the answer? I’m not sure. Is my belief that we cease to exist better than knowing for sure? Is it better than the possibility that there could be something beyond this world?
In every dream I have of Stephanie, we are on earth. We are flesh and blood and she has not died. I have not resurrected her.
In one dream, we smoke long, skinny pretzels like cigarettes in the backseat of our family van. In another, we take pictures of each other making cross-eyed, tongue-out faces in a New York City hostel. In another, we are old.
I think the only answer that would do me any good is to know that I was in some way wrong; that there is some kind of Heaven. That would be difficult in that I would have to accept that what I have believed up until that point is false. Once you know, you can’t take it back.
When I squeezed her hand that day and told her it looked like we were praying, Stephanie rolled her eyes, then her whole head across the room, resting her gaze finally on the room’s one window which overlooked a smaller wing of the hospital that housed cancer patients. She could not speak above a barely audible whisper after weeks of being intubated, but I swore I heard her scoff.
She looked back at me, keeping her hand in mine, her eyes anticipating a punch line. I considered what I might pray for—her liver to miraculously heal, her voice to return in full again, her guidance on what to do now. Instead, I crossed myself—in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit—glancing over my shoulder toward the nurse’s window as if to confirm for her that no one was watching. She dropped her head back on the pillow, closing her eyes and smiling, content that no one had seen, that no one would hear our secret prayer.
Alex Dodt is a philosophy teacher and dog father in Phoenix. His work has appeared in Ghost City Review, Qu, Abstract Magazine and others. He founded and helps create The Grief Commune, a local zine and community group organized around the politics of collective grief.