The Religous Experience

I went to church last night. I sat there, trying to enjoy the huge, silent cathedral in the heart of Manhattan, but my mind was racing. It was then I realized I don’t do this enough. I don’t sit alone in the quiet, because sometime in the past two years quiet has become uncomfortable. The noise is deafening outside the church, and the glare of Rockefeller center, the women in the Coach store buying expensive purses with their iPods blaring.
This is the atmosphere I am accustomed to now — the constant clambering, pounding, screeching.

My roommate, who is very religious, asked me if I had gone to church yet when I told her about the big interview. I explained that it felt strange to be asking for something after I had spent so much time away, so much time avoiding the silence. She encouraged me, and I wanted to go – in the past I have gone in for mass, or to light a candle, or just to sit for a few minutes before returning to the noise.

But a conversation with a close friend this weekend put the idea back in my head, as I counted up the times I have been to church, or even stopped to take a deep breath and say thank you for the life I am living, which, right now, feels like the one I have always asked for.

Of course religion for me, like it does for many people, brings feelings of guilt along with any feelings of relief it provides. I remember going to mass once or twice when I was a kid, (we were Holiday Catholics to the extreme) and never knew the reason why I was not permitted to go up to the front of the church and receive communion. Maybe I wasn’t old enough, maybe I wasn’t (fill in the blank) enough, but we never went to mass frequently so it wasn’t something I felt I needed to ask my mother about. It was only when I was an adult that I finally put all the pieces together.

I knew I wasn’t baptized as my brother and sister had been. I just assumed my mother, a single parent, had stopped going to church over the years, and didn’t think it important to go through this ceremony with me. Through pieces of conversations when I was younger, I learned my brother and sister (10 and 8 years older) were adopted and my mother divorced her high school sweetheart when they were little. It was not until I was a young teenager as my mother tucked me into bed that I said something about her being married twice. She looked away, the Catholic guilt stained her face. She corrected me, saying she was only married once, kissed my forehead gently and walked out of the room.

I lay awake for hours trying to piece her history, and mine, together in my head.

Now that I am older, these conversations with my mother are more clear and linear. I am still afraid to some extent to ask big questions, but she is no longer so hesitant in giving me the answers.

His name, my father, was Stanley Harris. He was a working-class man, an elevator operator. My mother was alone, with two small children when they met. They were together, although my mother perhaps knew she would never love him the way she was supposed to love a man. He was a comfortable place for her to fall, although he was little support when she really needed him. After I was born, they arranged to get married, picked out a suit for my brother, and a flower girl dress for my sister. Her side of the story, the only side I have ever known, says that he was never fully reliable. Always wanting to come and go as he pleased, and never committing to the idea of marriage, or being a father.

So one day, when I was five or so, she told him to leave and never come back. And he never did.

I have told very few people that my parents were never married. I have dealt with it in my own way, but it will never stop being my little secret, I suppose.

So I let the silence engulf me last night. I sat and observed the other visitors, all better Catholics, better people perhaps, than I. I sat in the pew for a half-hour before my head calmed, and I could pray. I asked God for the strength to wait for an answer from the AP. I asked for the result I wanted. I asked for patience. I asked Him to show me the right way to pray. I asked for forgiveness for not being a better Catholic. I lit a candle.

So now my world is spinning again. But I am calmer. The calm is, however, peppered with questions. And I guess, to some extent, those will never stop.