True Colors and Questions

We played in a hotel room in the early morning, the night before the state Academic Decathlon competition. Our advisor stopped by the room at 11 or midnight and saw us all there, teen boys and girls together. He asked if we needed any snacks or drinks, we told him we were set, and then he went off to bed. He trusted us, and remarkably, we merited it.

They called the game True Colors. Everyone in the group writes three questions on separate pieces of paper. Individuals take turns drawing out papers, reading then answering the questions on them – and then everyone else must answer the same question in turn, writer included. No ducking, no distracting dares. Just truth.

I remember sharing my doubt that anyone unrelated to me would attend my funeral if I died. “I’d come,” Erica said. So did John, April…others, solemnly. It meant a lot to a somewhat depressed sophomore. I was the kid on the team; they welcomed me and looked out for me. Acadeca was the first friend group I felt solidly part of, and that night in the hotel room, I learned that I mattered to them.

I also learned that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

I was a strict Catholic in those days, and I did my level best to abide by the Ten Commandments. Needless to say, number six gets a little tricky during adolescence with its “impure thoughts.” (That’s an awful, damaging lens with which to view sexuality, but I’m already meandering enough without adding a rant.) I strove earnestly to maintain my purity. Mostly, I drew arbitrary lines in the sand about what was “too far.” Those sands were constantly shifting, of course, because I was a teenager and had hormones, but I kept drawing out new lines when they got blown or washed away, and I fought not to let them budge too far, largely with success.

Half my teammates, I learned during True Colors, were averred beach bums who had frolicked through plenty of sand.

I realized, at some point during the night, that according to my prior convictions, those people should go to Hell. I realized at the same moment that my beliefs had to be wrong. I knew them, and they were good people; a just and loving God who would consign them to eternal flames could not be just and loving.

That was my first major shift in my religious beliefs. I had always asked inconvenient questions in Sunday school and mentally criticized some of the teacher’s statements. (Did you know that the Disney corporation sinfully promoted homosexuality, and that the sexually permissive attitudes in Sweden made it nearly impossible to maintain purity of mind there?) The pace of my questioning grew along with my discomfort with catechism. Following Confirmation, I begged my parents to let me stop going; I’d spend the whole hour at home reading the Bible, I offered. They said no, and that the teacher (a family friend) was well-prepared and knowledgeable, so I should ask any questions I had and make catechism better. She wasn’t, and I didn’t. But I still had the questions.

The second major shift came three years after, when the investigative team of the Boston Globe demonstrated the Catholic Church had systematically buried the crimes of pedophilic priests for decades. Cardinal Law, a man delegated to elect the pope himself, had enabled priests to harm dozens and dozens of children, and the practice was hardly confined to Boston. I had excused the Church’s past abuses as the past, but I could not excuse hierarchy-shielded molestation.

I sought other churches for a few years. The Methodist pastor in my hometown had charisma and intellect. The fourth or fifth time I attended, he used the word “heretics” to describe Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and my stomach churned. He knew what the word meant, knew what viciousness believers have justified using that word, and he used it anyway. I never attended again. Once I moved out of state, I attended a United Church of Christ congregation maybe a dozen times. The social views were progressive, and everyone was friendly; a well-meaning fortyish woman suggested on multiple occasions that she could set me up with a young woman my age who was looking for a “nice young Christian man.” Was that what I was? The phrase betokened a doctrinal soundness I hadn’t felt in years. I would have demurred even if I hadn’t been dating my now-wife.

I felt more welcome in these places because they were not Catholic; these places felt wrong because they were not Catholic enough. The politics, the attitudes, the reactionary stances of the Catholic Church all repel me, but I still feel impelled toward ritual. Protestants commonly refer to Jesus as “their personal Lord and Savior,” or discuss “their personal relationship to Jesus Christ.” As a former Catholic, I couldn’t feel that. I had been trained since birth to apply my heart to ritual, to discern God in the distance and the unknowable, to follow priests and contemplate the mysteries of the sacraments. In a time gone by, I once told a close friend that even if I broke with Catholicism, I would still feel compelled to attend Mass periodically to take the Eucharist. Once you’ve held the transubstantiated Body and Blood of Christ within you, wept with the joy of it, the little wafers of Protestant churches don’t cut it. They’re just bread.

So are the Catholics hosts. “Give it time,” my friend had responded, and he was right. Every once in a long while I wish he hadn’t been. Faith left behind a sad, angry, necessary hole. I’m a better man for having felt both.

I suppose I’m a secular humanist, nearly, but there’s that backbone of belief that seems to disqualify me there, too. I sometimes tell people that I’m a recovered Catholic, and the first half of that is mostly true. I don’t really look for labels, and I don’t think it matters. I don’t have absolute certainty in my answers to life’s questions – I mostly distrust those who think they do. Those I most admire, religious and irreligious alike, pursue belief and moral rightness as seekers, rather than viewing religion or other dogma as an answer key, or importable code like kung fu in The Matrix. I try to live and be good, love my neighbor and make people’s lives better instead of worse. I feel as though most sects and faiths owe their existences to debates over technicalities, and I just cannot imagine an all-good, all-knowing, all-loving God caring about quibbles. As the great American thinker Amy Farrah Fowler said on The Big Bang Theory, “I don’t object to the concept of a deity, but I’m baffled by the notion of one that takes attendance.”

I enter churches very rarely these days – weddings, funerals, architectural tours. When I do, I pray briefly. Not a rote prayer, which I left behind with Catholicism (though I assure you that if pressed, I could still rip through the decades of a rosary with speed to match any church lady). It’s some variation of this:

God, I do not know for certain that I am following the right path, but I am trying. You gave me a wonderful mind that I’m grateful for, and all I know to do is to trust to my thinking and do what I believe is good, and if I am failing in that, I am sorry. Thank you for the life I have.