Prayer Pattern – Derailed

Saturday night, Amelle and I walked home from the tram station after a night at the pubs.  The neighborhood—so cheery during the day—looked strange under the whining yellow street lights, casting everything in shadowy mustard colors.  Not sinister in the dark, the primary-colored doors still shone from their frames; the brick terraced houses still neat and warm looking, still with tidy gardens and vine-covered wrought iron.  Not sinister, or gloomy, but strange, like a bright café festooned for Halloween, the pale blue walls hung with cobwebs and paper bats, the floral mugs sitting on black tablecloths—incongruous.  I found nighttime and streetlight illumination incongruous with Rathmines.

“What do you do tomorrow?” Amelle asked, her heeled boots clicking against the sidewalk.

“I promised a friend I would go to church,” I said.

“Well, there are very many churches in Dublin.”

“Yes, I have lots of options,” I said, but I my thoughts strayed towards Christ’s Church—and wasn’t I annoyed that this church and its great sister, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, were Anglican?—the churches that weren’t options, well, options for experiment, but not for my chosen prayers.  Churches like the one slowly growing in our view, a gray mass of stone angles.  Somewhat distant from the last street lamp, it stayed dark, with its diamond-paned windows dully reflecting an ashes-and-honey mosaic—gray, black, gray, yellow—the maples and sycamores breathing softly in the yard.  The old tombstones tall and tilted, like a partially destroyed house of cards.  Holy Trinity Church, also Anglican, sat right at the end of my street, visible from my front door.  It’s constant presence in my peripheral vision coaxing my annoyance towards something more complicated.

Well, there are very many churches in Dublin—Yes, I have lots of options—in some ways.  My thoughts strayed farter, back to the cab driver from my first day—Lost a lot’a churches here’a late.  B’cause d’at child abuse scandle’s so drawn out’ere . . . Yeah, lost a lot’a churches here—then I was thinking about Spain, about Seville.  There, almost a year ago, I attended the Sunday morning Mass at the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, third biggest church on the planet.  It’s size, the weight of the brown stone above, making me feel like I was underground, far underground staring up towards some unreachable opening, the pale stained glass windows high above.  In the world of gloom-and-shadows stone, the blue and green in the windows became a better place of grass and rivers, of light.  I was supposed to be gazing up to heaven, but I felt like I was descending into hell a la Dante, then looking over my shoulder, back up to Earth, wondering—What am I leaving?

 

“I hope people actually go to church here,” I told Amelle as we neared home, “when I was in Spain there were many beautiful churches but they were often very empty.”  Mass in Seville’s cathedral on a warm July Sunday: only fifty people, most over sixty, the rest bumbling tourists who talked through the service, a rapid-fire homily, no music.  Mass complete: forty minutes elapsed.

Amelle looked at me curiously, “Ireland is majority Catholic, no?”

“So is Spain, supposedly.” We walked on for a while, turning onto our street, narrower, the houses slightly shabbier, trash in some yards and flushed against the curbs.  Paint peeling from the lintels and gables, from the green and red doors.  Rust showing through on the railings.  Overgrown ivy beside wilting daffodils.

“Do people go to church in France?” I asked, hoping to illustrate my point.

“Eh, no.  No in France most people do not believe, they are—I do not know what is the word?” As we opened the purple gate to our driveway.

“Atheists?”

“Yes.  Yes, most people in France are atheists and they do not go to church.”

I nodded, bid her goodnight, and slipped upstairs, hesitating a moment before setting my 7:00 alarm.

 

I didn’t get out of bed when it went off.  Gray light seeping in under the heavy blinds that I kept drawn against the street lamp outside.  I had planned to attend the eight-o-clock service—I generally prefer the early-bird bunch to the crowdedness of later services—but now eleven-o-clock was my only option.  Listed as the “family Mass,” I prepared for screaming children, cooing parents and crowds.

But instead of getting up at 9:00, I laid in bed for another hour, feeling slightly morose and not really wanting to leave the accumulated warmth under my comforter.  Eventually hunger overpowered laziness, and I crawled out to make pasta—my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Down in the gray kitchen, absently stirring the pot and watching the clock.  10:20—and it was about a fifteen minute walk to the church.  Finish cooking, eat, brush teeth, put on make-up, walk—sudden anxiety that I wouldn’t even make the eleven-o-clock, or worse, that I would make it late.

But apathy quickly smothered anxiety.  If I didn’t make it to church, I didn’t make it to church.  I’d go next week.  For now I’d retreat to my comforter, watch a movie, talk a walk in the city this afternoon if weather permitted.

I left the house ten minutes later, not quite sure how I’d managed it, pleasantly surprised that I’d be to the church fifteen minutes early.

Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners is just as grand as it sounds.  I hesitantly approached the four huge pillars supporting a triangular façade, reminding me of old Greek ruins except for the stone angels staring down from the corners and the huge copper-dome-gone-green.  Through the heavy wooden doors, I entered a space of blues and creams, incredibly ornate arched ceilings covered with robin-egg insets and cream-plaster medallions.  Even on that overcast day, the sun through the windows reflected off all the pale surfaces until the whole space glowed—so different than Seville.

Rows and rows of dark wooden pews and red-fabric kneelers. I counted them, estimating this place could hold six hundred people.  But at the moment, I was the only one.  Three older women talked quietly at the back of the church, arranging weekly bulletins and exchanging gossip.  One broke away to kneel in the back pew while I went halfway up the aisle to sit, feeling incredibly conspicuous, my heels clicking on the tile.  I knelt and sighed.  This was Ireland, not Spain.  People might just come late.

And they did, all thirty of them scattered through the wide sanctuary.  We looked like a congregation of xenophobes.

After a few more people filtered in, a rather round woman with short honey hair stepped up to the ambo—“Good morning, it’s great t’see so many people here”—I resisted the urge to glance around with raised eyebrows—“and we’d like to welcome the O’Connell family who are here f’r’a family reunion”—she gestured left to a block of about ten people sitting in their Sunday best.  I was doing the math on how many people must usually come to this Mass, and coming up with about two.  The woman continued—“T’is morning we’re going t’do somet’in’ a little bit different, we have t’hymns printed in the regular bulletin instead of printing an extra hymn sheet”—I flipped to the inside of my bulletin, opposite the readings from Acts, Revelations, and John, were three short hymns and a psalm.  The woman sung the first verse of the hymns for us to learn—because there were no printed notes.  “Now, the ot’r t’ing we’re doing different, is t’at we’re goin’ t’sing t’e psalm today, which is somt’in’ we don’t always do at t’is Mass.  How it works is, I’ll sing t’refrain first, t’en you sing it wit’ me, here, let’s practice—‘O God, may all the nations praise You, let all the nations praise You’”—she raised her hand for us to join, I hit the first note and immediately killed the motor.  No one else was singing, not unless breathing into your bulletin while moving your lips counted.

“Good,” said the cantor (and this time I did raise my eyebrows), “Let’s try’t once more.”

I gave my alto notes a little more reign, hoping people would be more confident if they felt like others were singing.  Incorrect.  I remained solitary.  Loud, and solitary.  The cantor made eye contact with me from the ambo.

After the singing lesson, Mass began.  A slender bald priest taking his place to the left of the altar, “T’Lord be wit’ya.”

“And with your spirit,” I said, and started, surprised by the dominance of my own voice, wondering if I had said the wrong thing, if the responses in Ireland were different.  In the states, everyone speaks together, each individual curving their natural cadence slightly, fitting into the larger voice until all the words come together, a thundering “And with your spirit.”  Each church, each mass even, takes on a slightly different speed, rhythm, rising and falling pitch pattern.  And if you grow up tin the same parish, at the same service for an entire childhood of Sundays, that pattern becomes as internal as DNA, as taken for granted as a native language, as recognizable as one’s own name.  So when I spoke full and confident under the creamy domes of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners—And with your spirit—I was startled to speak alone.  I recoiled immediately, assuming an error on my part. But when the next came, I listened and realized everyone was saying the same thing, but at different times, speeds, and rhythms, without regard for the voices around them.  The church hummed slightly, but did no speak.

I felt the shadows of Seville closing around my shoulders.  I hadn’t realized how much I was counting on these responses, on these words.  I had come, expecting to find a place with it’s own strong cadence, it’s own pattern of prayer.  I had expected to incorporate that pattern into my own, if only a little, through the ten Sundays I would spend here in Dublin.  But instead of a voice, instead of a rhythm I could make my own, I found disintegration and separateness.   I felt as if I’d knocked on the door of an adopted family, and instead of seeing them all waiting around the dinner table—T’Lord be wit’ ya’–And with your spirit—I found my adopted mother, father, brother, niece, uncle, all in different rooms doing different things.  Paying no attention to one another or to me.  The church seemed to darken.

The priest went on: “Now in t’first reading, we see a beautiful city comin’ down from heav’n”—I paused and checked my bulletin.  He was talking about Revelations, the second reading.  The first was about circumcision disputes in the early church, a reading from Acts.  Maybe he just misspoke.

But when the lector came up to read—“T’e angel took me in spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me t’holy city Jerusalem”—somewhere behind and to my left, a baby started screaming, cuing another, then another sitting five rows in front of me, her blond father bouncing her in his arms.  Soon the lector was half shouting—“T’E CITY HAD NO NEED A’SUN’R MOON T’SHINE ON’T, FOR T’GLORY OF GOD GAVE’T LIGHT, AN’ ITS LAMP WAS T’LAMB!”

At least in one expectation for this morning, I had not been entirely incorrect: many screaming babies.

Mass continued.  During the homily, the children came up around the altar, and the priest asked them to imagine their own city of Jerusalem—the general consensus was that it had a purple castle and lots of sheep.  I don’t really remember the rest of what he said.  The incorrigible green-eyed tot playing peek-a-boo with his parents from behind the alter, the sudden discovery that shouting meant the priest’s mic shot your voice around the room, and general cheery mischief distracted me.  Or so my story goes.

At communion, the woman sitting to my left—the direction of the center aisle—made it very clear she was not going up to receive bread and wine. But, as she was elderly and rather round, she also made it clear she was not shifting from her seat.  This caused only minor embarrassment for me, as I tottered along the kneeler in my gray-canvas heels, but the bent-and-gray grandfather behind me had more trouble, and his cloud-haired wife even more.  Soon the no-communion-lady was shuffling into the aisle, huffing.  The grandpa was grumbling, the wife advising, their daughter directing, their son-in-law hovering, the whole church staring.  Lucky for me, once I cleared the bottleneck, a teal-eyed teenager with red hair and freckles waved me into the line, so—letting his courtesy be my excuse to ignore the difficulties behind—I entered the stream, quickly carried away from the pile-up, off to the dinner table.

The communion wafer tasted even more like nothing than the air-and-wheat cardboard served up at home, and while holding the chalice I briefly contemplated downing all the wine and making a break for it.  I rolled my eyes at myself, to the confusion and distress of the woman proffering the cup, who did not understand the inward direction of the gesture.

Mass ended, to a chorus of babies ringing louder than the half-un-sung hymn.  I left my pew, darting around the no-communion woman still teetering at the end of the bench, walked straight up the center aisle and out the double doors, back into Dublin, the city streets.

The Eye Experiment

While I am here, I’ve been experimenting with the power of eye contact.  No, that’s not true, I always experiment with eye contact.  At home, and here.  Mostly when I’m walking—walking to class with my headphones filling my skull with guitars, walking to church and admiring the early Sunday light, crossing the street to the library, strolling around the red brick of my Dublin neighborhood, the strewn beer cans of my Athens one, both bursting with oak trees and lilac bushes.  When I am walking, I make eye contact with the people I pass, even if I shouldn’t.  To be honest, I don’t know how not to make eye contact with them.  The man walking towards me is easily the most interesting thing on the street this morning, and if I look at his pale, button-down shirt or his swishing blue jeans, he might get the wrong idea—though that’s not really the point, because it’s not his clothes that are the most interesting thing, it’s his face, let’s be honest—it’s his pale, not-shaved-for-three-days face with brown stubble shadowing his chin and cheeks, his almost-black eyes, bushy eyebrows and pleasantly straight nose.  It’s the way one corner of his mouth turns down more than the other, the long-faded scar on his left temple, the dark, dark eyes.  The most interesting thing.  And if I look at anything else I feel stupid, like a person walking down the road staring straight up into the sky—I’m sorry, Sir, but I really want to make eye contact with you.  Please, please, please, don’t freak out.  No I’m not a creep, I don’t think.  And no I’m not hitting on you, unless you’re eyes are a surprising shade of blue/green/brown, and unless you lift one corner of your mouth when you look at me.  Then I might be hitting on you, but please, just carry on and forget about my prying as soon as our shoulders pass.

So the experiment goes.  The trouble is that here in Dublin, I walk much more than I do at home, and I pass more people on these busy streets than I do in my sleepy town.  Many more eyes to build bridges to.  And when I’m not walking—instead of sitting in class with eyes I know, or at home with essays and assignments—I’m sitting in pubs or cafes with tables and tables of new eyes with new faces around them.  Sitting in my favorite local coffee shop, a comfy green armchair, tea at my left elbow, and across the way, under a red and yellow painting of a woman with startling, bright eyes—can you imagine what they were in the flesh!—is a twenty-something woman with half her head shaved, the other half thick with dark curls.  Her features are almost masculine in their straight, clean angles, a stud in one nostril, many rings on her fingers—silver, jade, bronze.  She sits back in her chair with her legs crossed, unabashed and emphasizing her strong, broad shoulders, her muscular thighs.  When she notices my gaze, her eyes—an unexpected pale green—flash back.  The very left corner of her mouth pulls up, then more.  I squint slightly.  We look away.  Experiment 6235, Result – Positive.

In a club I scan the room while my housemates return to their native languages.  So I’m slightly bored, but there is a man—long and clean limbed, dark brown hair cut short.  Jaw bone like the flint edge of an arrowhead only slightly hidden by a short beard.  I can’t tell the color of his eyes.  But he sits at a table across the room and listens to his friend, who does most of the talking.  Patience in the easy rest of his shoulders against the leather booth, patience in the stead tilt of his head, patience in listening to the other’s monologue, patience the way we indulge those we love, not because we are willing to wait out their long soliloquies, but because we love to watch them be who they are.  Absolutely attentive.  And in his absolute attention, he looks at nothing else.  Experiment 6236, Result – Inconclusive.

 

 

In a sense I’m testing love at first sight—well, not love in the romantic sense, at least, not always.  Connection at first sight.  Is it all in the eyes?

I’m testing Socrates’ theory that each of our souls takes after a god, and that physical attraction is a recognition of compatible godliness in another—are you the Hephaestus to my Aphrodite, or the Hestia to my Hera?  Can you see that in my eyes?  Can I?

 

 

Walking out of St. Stephen’s Green towards home, the afternoon slipping over into sunset, light going gold.  I turned the corner at the motorcycle shop, the bright shiny bikes already removed from the sidewalk, and begin my long straight-shot down Camden Road.  But just past the bike shop, cramped against the 7-11, is a glass-front café, and at the front table facing out, a pair of brilliant blue eyes, lit from the bright sun slanting in southwest to northeast.  Stop.  My boot soles slow in their steady long strides.  Arrested by blue.  And somehow, some trick of the setting sun, some slant to the light, my face is lit as well, bright and glowing amber, reflected in the glass, my own brown eyes reflected.  I see him looking at me, and I see me looking at him, side by side, our faces almost overlaid.  I watch the left corner of my mouth pull up.  I notice him set down his mug of tea, back on the saucer in front of him. I see him.  I see him seeing me.  I see me.  I see blue.  His eyes still as bright as they were two seconds before, shot with lighter gray.

The brick wall of the 7-11 intercedes between us, as my steps carry me farther down this Dublin street.  Experiment 6237 – Conclusive.  No further tests necessary. 

First Lamb, Fresh Love

Last night we headed to O’Neill’s—my housemate Amelle, her colleague Aurelius, and I—for diner, drinks, and some traditional Irish music.  Night fell misty blue over the cobbled streets, speakers over every door spinning out whatever fiddle, flute or guitar sang inside, street lights coming on, little roads filled with the usual mixture of students, tourists, revelers.  I wanted to enjoy the hand-shaking, shoulder-slapping fellowship of the streets—so different from the carnival-feel of Spain, the sweaty-clubs of Tel Aviv or the drunk boredom of Ohio.  I wanted to have people to call out to across the street, to meet and mingle with, travel in a pack that goes rolling down the street.  But I was—am—still so knew to this city, and last night I was hungry from a pricey afternoon at the Guinness Storehouse which left me no money for a snack between “black stuff” and the pub.  I was cranky, and Amelle—in the measured quietness of her dark French curls and impeccable Paris fashion—did most of the navigating.

We wandered about, asking directions, getting contradictory answers, shuffling down side streets, realizing we were going in circles; I would have thoroughly enjoyed being so lost if my stomach had been a little less vocal.

Finally we asked a man taking a smoke outside the bright red façade of the “Auld Dubliner.” He seemed to know what he was about—“O’Neill’s?  Yeah, O’Neill’s,” he leaned into the pub to ask the bouncer, then he turned back to us, rubbing his shiny bald head with his free hand.  “Yeah, it’s not far, it’s not far.”  The bouncer joined, “You’re gonna turn here, yes, right here, turn right to Dame Street, an’you’ll see Ulster Bank across the way? Yeah, it’s in the same building, jus’ on t’ot’er side.”

We thanked him and set off down a road we’d walked at least three times, crossed over Dame Street with it’s towering bronze statues, heading for the bank.

“There it is,” I said, pointing to a green and brown storefront complete with square-paned windows and glossy gold-on-black lettering.  Green vines draping down from the flowerboxes.  Going inside, we realized that the modest façade visible from Dame Street concealed a wide maze of dark wood paneling and leather benches, complete with two buffet lines and at least two bars.  The warm, hearty smells of gravy, meat and stuffing pulled us in until we were seated with menus in our hands and our wallets on the table.  I mentally luxuriated in the list of goodies—oysters, bacon-wrapped chicken, salmon, turkey—until the promise of food no longer satisfied. I ordered a steaming lamb shank with red wine and mushroom sauce over two scoops of mashed potatoes.

“What is that?” Amelle asked.

“Lamb, this is the first time I’ve ever had it,” as I sat down with my steaming plate.

“Oh it’s so good,” said Aurelius, “You’ve never had?”

“No, it’s not very popular in the states” with my fork poised over the food, wondering how to attack the hunk of meat.

“Y’ve never had lamb?” a fair-haired man leaned over, speaking thick Irish brogue. “You’ll love it, especially here. An’what’ve you got?” leaning over Amelle’s plate, “Just’a plate’a veggies?” Sounding appauled.

“There’s salmon hiding in there,” I said as Amelle delicately picked at the lemon slices covering her fish.

“You may need to help her, I think,” said Aurelius.

“Well, th’a’ won’be a problem.  I could start righ’ na-ow,” laughing with his companions.  We subsided back into our separate conversations.

The lamb was delicious, warm and heavy with enough fat in the meat to make a dieter cringe, but the muscle underneath so much better for it, the pink and brown meat falling of the bone if I held the knife too close.  I carved it down in fifteen minutes, then wolfishly considered the bone.

After dinner we headed upstairs for the music, squeezing between among a knot of young men enthralled by a televised boxing match and a group of French girls sharing drinks.  The band was tuning up on the small stage—a square-jawed man whose dark hair and beard matched the patina on his flute, a russet haired woman sitting aloof with her concertina, and a ruddy blond guitarist acting as spokesman.  He introduced “d’band” and “d’tunes” with the flute player throwing in jokes—“T’is’s what y’get folks, when I don’drink durin’ a gig,” toasting us with his McCafe cup.  They spoke low to each other under the pick-up of the mics.

The first song—Star of County Down—fingers flashing over frets, flute holes and button keys, the guitarist singing—I’ve travelled a bit, but never was hit since my roving career began—my eyes wandered to the light-fingered flautist, down to the French girls having a drink, a young man with honey-colored hair coming to sit on the stage steps, his long frame languid on his makeshift seat, but his shoulders and attentive face turned towards the group’s beauty—a heart-faced blond.  I’d a heart to let and no tenant yet . . . But in she went and asked no rent from the star of the County Down.  I couldn’t hear their conversation, but gradually she turned more and more from her tittering companions, barely even noticing when several stood to go.

Several more songs I—When off Holyhead I wished meself was dead, or better of instead on the rocky road to Dublin—then an instrumental reel, and I lost track of the music, too engrossed in the slowly shifting posture of the pair across the way, like watching a flower track the sun.  They sat apart facing each other, then leaning in, then further, then holding hands, then touching shoulders.  A slight feeling of jealousy at the sudden simplicity of their lives, of the two-point system they had found tucked within the whirly chaos of music, crowd and pub, their sudden simplicity across from my own life trying to make new friends in this new place, of trying to keep in contact with those back home, of trying to not keep in contact with some back home, balancing, balancing—send that email, not that text, have coffee even though you’re tired and want to go home, laugh even though you’re nervous, look interested even when Amelle and Aurelius speak only in French, go home and blog before falling into bed, connect, connect, fight you’re introverted tendencies, connect, connect, balance.  And here, for these few hours, these two cut themselves from the chatter, scaled down from the light noise of a galaxy to a binary-star, orbiting, orbiting, both around the other.  I was pleasantly envious, the way we envy fifty-year couples sitting on park benches or children chasing geese across the lawns, hand-in-hand parents behind.  Envious of things I might have.  Seeing them makes me hope and sink at the same time—not yet, by maybe.  Watching them lean together, slightly sad at their unawareness of my distant admiration, relieved that it was so, that my watching didn’t break the double gravity of two, for tonight, orbiting.

When the band closed, the flute player played the last song, a breathy baritone, like a wave pulling back to sea, or his wooden flute on its lowest notes.  I was glad to leave my bar stool, descend the steps back out into the Dublin streets, the mess of taxis and wobbly, high-heeled girls already four beers deep.  Flashing headlights, whining streetlights, the colored lights of dance clubs, sudden brightness of late-night snack bars.  All the fluorescents, neons, incandescents so much more confusing than the single, steady light of day.  Turn your face to the sun, become one to one, remember them as they were, forever in that corner of the bar, as if they never left, would never leave, honey and wheat on the steps below the flute, one and one, oribiting.

Many Shades of Ocean

The number of blues the ocean holds always catches me off guard.  A coast-ignorant, land-locked girl, I always expect the sea to be a flat blue, the only gradation caused by the wave-texture of the surface, like wrinkled blue cotton, …

Things Beneath Our Feet

I just couldn’t get over the floors, the tiled floors of Christ’s Church.  Green, red, brown, black, yellow, and white tiles that cast back the light so strangely—softly, velveteen—that at first I thought they were some strange, hardened leather.  The glaze had a mottled depth of color like old leather, and somehow this ceramic felt softer under my boots, but perhaps that was a deception of my first impression.

The patterns changed with every step, sometimes wheels with different rings—concentric rows of people, griffons, knots, roses, crowns, fleur de lies—or diamonds, triangles, checkers, all tessellations of these same colors and figures.  I expected them to repeat each other at some point, for some over all design or consistency to emerge.  But I never quite found it.  Trying to unravel them, I walked through the early gothic cathedral with my eyes to the floor.

I’d seen Gothic churches before, of course.  When I went to Spain last summer every town had at least one Gothic church, or so it seemed.  They were so common that my architecture professor delineated Early, Middle and Late Gothic, based on the arches, windows, design, use of color.  He pointed out the baroque elements creeping in through frescoes and color, or the darker, crouching Romanesque elements from early construction.  But all those churches, from the seventh century to the seventeenth, all had plain stone floors, sometimes with simple engravings or patterns to the pavers.  Nothing to distract the upward gaze of the believer as the eyes slid up the columns to the capitals, the arches, the windows, pointing to vaulted ceilings, and through the mortared cracks to heaven.  These intricate and endlessly looping tiles seemed counterproductive.

I tried, at first, to focus upwards, to sit in the rows of wooden chairs and look penitently towards the ceiling—as tourists and pilgrims around me did.  But when I looked up, I noticed other things—the way the north wall bowed inward, severely, looking close to collapse.  I wondered that the windows didn’t snap from strain.  When I looked up, I noticed the extranal window-grates visible through the detailed glass.  Thoughts of stone-throwing, fires and riots flickered and flared in my head.  The legacy Irelands religious tumult?  Legacy of this church as Catholic, then Anglican, then Catholic, then Anglican?  I remembered those Spanish cathedrals, so obviously bearing the scars of their own conflicts, so obvious which windows remained and which were replaced.  And those structures had always housed Catholic prayer, and they still bore scars.

And wasn’t I annoyed—be honest, Annie—that this church and its great sister, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, were Anglican?  That founded, constructed, and celebrated as Catholic for hundreds of years, I couldn’t go to Mass in either?  Didn’t I feel that, at least a little?  Was that feeling allowed?

I immediately scolded myself—Anne Marie, grudging people their place of worship, the place that has been theirs too for hundreds of years is on the exact same spectrum as Jews who refuse to recognize the validity of the Dome of the Rock, or the Muslims who refuse to recognize Adyodhya as a Hindu shrine.  Feelings you condemn in others.  I have seen the results of these feelings—bullet holes in church walls, slanted pot marks gouged from the stone, armed guards at mosque gates, tall in their army green with rifles as long as my leg, angry graffiti, Death to Hindus, Death to Christians, Death to Muslims, contorted faces, shouting, yelling, screaming faces.  Annie, you have seen these feelings. Feelings that sparked riots, bombings, shootings, wars.  Death, Annie, those feelings sparked death and killing.  Excise these feelings from your heart.  They lead to nothing good.

But I still feel them, however faintly, and will continue to feel them—I think—so long as people try to tell me I do not have a stake in this place, or any other, because I am Catholic.  My rejection of this Anglican place is a reaction to past rejection, a reaction to people telling me I cannot lay claim to this or that, because I am Catholic.  How many atheists and agnostics have told me, though not in so many words—You cannot be tolerant, because you are a Catholic.  You cannot respect women, because you are a Catholic.  You cannot respect gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, or hell, even sexually active people, because you are Catholic.  What did one friend tell me when I refused his romantic advances?  “Yeah, I should have known a UU (Unitarian Universalist) and a Catholic would never work.” Translation: You cannot accept and love me, because you are Catholic.  Words that knocked me back a step, or two.

And I feel those words in this church, in the bowed walls, in the barred, saint-colored glass, in the stones those bars guard against—You cannot worship here, because you are Catholic.

I must remember, now, that I set the parameters of my Catholicism.  It is mine to define.  That only in letting others reject me do I feel the need to reject them.

I’ll sit here in these simple wooden chairs, staring at these beautiful tiles that reflect the softness, the infinity, complexity, and un-know-ability of the divine more than these lancet ceilings above.  I’ll stare at the ground and send out these thoughts: I am tolerant, and I am Catholic.  I do respect women, and I am Catholic.  I respect gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, divorced, Hindu, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, Atheist, Unitarian Universalist people, rocks, plants, porpoises and platypuses, and I am Catholic.  I can praise God in this place, and feel the power of the thousands who prayed before me, right here, and I am Catholic.  I smooth these feelings of hurt and exclusion, of telling me what I am and am not, I smooth those words over with new ones.  I stare at the floor, at the strange beauty of these tiles, and let the rest slip away.