Final draft: The Weight of One Strand of Hair

One Friday afternoon, after a painless one and a half hour drive, I arrived home from college for a weekend with my family. I walked into my bedroom and found an envelope addressed to me waiting on my bedside table. The return address indicated that it was from a small literary magazine. Another rejection letter. They had been rolling in over the past few months, ever since I went on a poem-submitting spree that summer.

I opened the envelope and a check for five hundred dollars fell out.

My first response was, “Holy shit, I won something!”

My second response was, “Holy shit, I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do.”

I was too excited to think. I would figure it out later. I practically floated out to the living room to announce to my parents, “I just won five hundred dollars in a poetry contest! And my poem’s going to be published!”

After the general exclamations of surprise and congratulations, my dad asked, “So what’s the poem?”

What was the poem? The poem was the essence of a secret that had been gnawing at me for over a year, condensed into fourteen lines.

Now the unexpected had happened, and the poem was going to be published, and my secret was out.

***

Losing my faith was simple, the work of a moment. I was in the back seat of a van driving through the Loire Valley with the fall sun streaming in through the window. The excursion was part of a five-month study abroad in France, the longest I had ever been away from home. I was reading The Stranger by Albert Camus. 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. 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.

The certainties of my faith weren’t helping me grow in any way; they told me how to live, and then they made me feel guilty if I failed to live that way. I wanted to find out for myself how to live. I wanted to shake off all the guilt and devote myself to appreciating the world around me, in all of its stunning, miniscule details.

Losing my faith was easy; the hard part was accepting that it was gone. Even if I wanted to figure things out for myself, I couldn’t forget that for twenty years, Catholicism had provided my moral grounding and an important part of my identity. My religious beliefs had also been part of the common glue that had bound me to my family. I may have lost my faith, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to lose any of those things.

When I returned to the U.S. that winter, I struggled to fit my new self back into the shape my old self had left behind. 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.

But what could I do but keep going to church, enacting the empty ritual, pretending I still cared? I couldn’t tell my family. I would do anything rather than hurt them by rejecting the faith they had raised me to believe in. I was afraid they would think less of me, or make repeated attempts to re-convert me.

For over a year, the struggle raged inside me. In the spring I took a poetry workshop. I found that writing was the only way I could force myself to think through the way my faith had shaped me and to consider what I would do now that it was gone. Slowly, secretly, I started to rebuild the foundations of my world.

***

I showed my parents the letter I had just opened. When my Mom saw the title of my poem, “The Good Book,” she asked, “Is it about the Bible?”
“Yup.” How could I tell her that the poem was basically bashing on the Bible? That it described my inability to accept the Bible as truth?
“So,” my mom asked, “do we get to see this poem?”
“Uh, yeah. I’ll show it to you…just not right now.”
My parents looked puzzled, but they didn’t press me for more information.

I decided to explain myself that night at dinner. As the meal got underway, I followed the conversation carefully, inserting comments and laughter when appropriate, nervously waiting for my opening. At every lull of silence I would start to steel myself to jump in, but each time something tugged me back. No, this is too hard. I’m not ready. I need more time to figure this out. But soon the plates were almost clear of food, and I knew it was now or never.

“So, I wanted to say…about this poem…I want to share it with you, but I have to do a little explaining.” I told them how I had been having doubts for a while, and that I wasn’t sure where I stood with the Catholic Church. I explained I had written poems to help me think through the issue, and that this was one of those poems.

Everyone looked at me for a moment longer. Then Dad asked Nora to pass the string beans.

The next day, though, my mom approached me in the kitchen while I was getting a snack. She 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. And after she said that, I knew she was right.