The other day in my Victorian Literature class, during a discussion of the widespread crisis of faith that followed the publication of Darwin’s writings on evolution and natural selection, our professor asked us if our generation had any way to understand the extreme shock that hit the Victorians when their creationist world view was ripped out from under them like an ancient, moth-eaten rug. As twenty-first century students at a liberal arts college that is in fact very liberal, evolution was no big news to us, the professor assumed. “So what’s your way in?” she asked. “Can you sympathize with these people, and if so, how?” Hands were going up all over the place. No less than three students said that they had been raised in small, insular communities that had taught them to take the Bible as the literal truth. Then they came to college and took their first biology course where they discovered that according to their professors and their peers, the world was actually much older than 4,000 years and men were descended from monkeys. My own story is somewhat less dramatic. I lost my faith, but it wasn’t violently torn from me; at the same time, I didn’t arrive at college eager to shed the Catholic tradition I had been raised in. But like the Victorians, once faith was gone I had to rebuild my world from the ground up.
I was in the back seat of a van driving through the Loire Valley with the fall sun streaming in through the window, and I was reading L’étranger by Albert Camus. The van ride was part of a weekend excursion to visit the castles of Chambord and Chenonceau, which was part of a study abroad program in France. Already having been steeped in the stunning elegance of the castles and their grounds, haven eaten the most gourmet cafeteria lunch of my life (salade de crudités, veal stew, and chocolate mousse), being in the company of ten fellow students who I had come to adore over the past month, I was overwhelmed with happiness. Camus’s existentialist reasoning was starting to work on me. When Meursault says of the priest, “He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair,” I felt a surge of revelation. Hair is beautiful! The uncountable number of filaments on each person’s head! So many different colors and textures! I wanted to spend the rest of my life appreciating things like hair and sunlight and the chocolate that I bought at the gas station half an hour back. I wanted to shake off all of the religious guilt that was paralyzing me and preventing me from loving the world around me.
My five-month stay in France was the longest I had ever been away from home, and what my parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. The parties, the drinking, the European men throwing themselves at me. I was asserting my independence, but I wasn’t out of control; I felt that as long as I kept myself on track with my own internal moral compass, I didn’t have to continue to follow church doctrine to the letter. I had always doubted some of the Church’s principles, anyway. Like, why is homosexuality a sin? And why can’t women be priests? I wasn’t sure how I felt about birth control and abortion. For the first time, I actively grappled with these issues and tried to understand my own position on them instead of just accepting that I had to believe certain things because the Church told me to. Nothing was automatic; letting go of my faith meant letting go of security and embracing ambiguity. I will never forget the look of bewilderment on one would-be-lover’s face when I told him that I couldn’t spend the night because I had been raised to believe that sex before marriage was a sin and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
But it was when I returned home that the real faith crisis began. The first Sunday I was back, I went to mass with my family and when I went up to the altar to receive communion, the Eucharist fell out of my hand. I was certain then that I was going to hell. I had no idea how to fit the person I had become back into my old life. I didn’t want to tell my family, so I kept going to mass, but I couldn’t accept what the priest was saying. The only way I could work through my questions and doubts was to write poems about religion and spirituality. My secret was out, though, when one of the poems was chosen to be published. My family would have to see it eventually. I explained everything one night at dinner: how I didn’t know what I believed anymore and how I was trying to work it out. My family looked at me for a bit, and then my dad asked my sister to pass the potatoes. But the next day, my mom thanked me for telling her what was going on. She said she was proud of me, and that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing: figuring out my faith for myself.
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First of all, great title.
ReplyDeleteIt’s great the way you weave the different parts of the story into one. Or rather, the order is good. There’s a clear crisis, and, although it is unresolved, there is a cohesive conclusion. You also have a great use of insignificant details that makes them seem significant—for example, the chocolate bar bought at the gas station.
One point that felt a little awkward to me was the last sentence of the second paragraph, where you talk about wanting to shake off the religious guilt. The rest of the piece certainly stems from this, and I can see how it ties into the (very nice) introduction, but when I read it I glanced back up at what I’d already read for a mention of religious guilt or confusion. You definitely talk about faith, losing it and rebuilding it, but no guilt. I wonder if you mean “guilt about my religion,” as opposed to “religious guilt,” which feels like you mean “guilt stemming from the teachings of religion.” Maybe it’s all the same. For me it just seemed like clarifying this would make the piece even more unified.