Quin found a used condom on the soccer field and paraded it around to our class as if he was the person who’d used it. We were twelve or thirteen. None of our teachers were nearby, though Quin had already gotten in trouble for watching porn during class, so even if our teachers had been close, they wouldn’t have necessarily been surprised. I can’t speak to the strength of my classmates’ spiritual convictions at the time—Catholic school tends to render that question moot, and usually not in the direction of devotion—but none of us were shocked at the fact of the condom, more repulsed that it had broken in the dirt, dried cum mixing in with dead grass, and that Quin had picked it up so gleefully. I didn’t translate evidence of premarital sex as sin. That was what our religion teachers told us, along with all the other scorned decisions and actions rattled off like elements on the periodic table, but we merely viewed sin, after so much talk of porn and pregnancy and the stages of lost innocence, as a matter of transgression, divorced from any sense of religious significance. So many of us had siblings who’d had kids when they were teenagers, parents who cheated, relatives who OD’d or lost all their money or, more euphemistically, took a wrong turn. To err simply was. 

Besides, most boys in my class, and the classes above us, were obsessed with sex, slurs, violence, the wet, aching progression of their bodies and those of their peers. The fresh surge of post-9/11 glibness and attraction to retaliatory aggression dovetailed nicely with a Jackass-inflected jokester ribaldry that favored a view of the body as meat to be tenderized, cheese-grated, fucked, and fucked up. Past a certain age, we knew, with the reluctant experience of children silently mocked for decisions their parents had made for them, that how we dressed for Catholic school—and even the plain fact of going to Catholic school—was embarrassing. We thought most of the priests on campus were pathetic. Why choose to be alone, bound to and by the cloth, made conspicuous by it? Christian Wiman, in his book My Bright Abyss, writes, “Live long enough in secular culture, long enough to forget that it is secular culture, and at some point religious belief becomes preposterous to you.” Taken as a percentage, most of my childhood was mired in the secular—over 75% of it, on a weekly basis, lived outside church and class, the intrusion of the religious usually played for a joke. 

It would’ve been difficult for me to discover real belief, faith that had been chosen honestly and wholly, a true conversion rather than a hereditary stain, the vestige of tradition or colonization or social pressure. I think it would have frightened me if I had found the genuine article as a child, either in myself or demonstrated in others. It would have meant that all this playacting belied something real, that there was a truth to the idea of a soul and its creation and its marring. More than that, it would have signified a pervasive darkness to the world, one where a capitulation to frailty or coercion by larger forces didn’t absolve someone from the consequences of their decisions. God was too massive a notion to countenance at that time. Less so, and more troubling, was the idea that we all might actually be on the hook. 

• • •

I fainted once during Mass. It was the first place every class went to before the school day began, and it wasn’t unusual for me to skip breakfast for lack of an appetite. Combine an empty stomach with standing, kneeling, and standing again, in addition to that juvenile sense of duty in a formal setting, the imperative to look and act reverent in a stifling collared shirt and clip-on tie, and fainting isn’t so surprising. I remember the sensation exactly, a cool band of sweat on my forehead, a fluid, roving slip of my sense of balance, the edges of my vision darkening, my body moving without my feeling it. I fell between the pew and the kneeler. In my memory, mass continued on while a few teachers rushed quietly over to me. I didn’t know any Protestants very well at that age, or I didn’t think of them as Protestants. But it reads as very Catholic to me now that there was never any room to interpret my episode as an instance of holy intervention, of ecstatic experience. It was simply demoralizing. 

That was almost twenty years ago, but on the right day, if I’m near the church where it happened, or I catch wind of the goings-on of an old classmate, the memory returns so clearly it’s as if it just happened. I suspect I remember that morning because I was mortified to see so many people staring at me. Fainting, like my lack of conviction in my religion as a child, felt as if it was my fault. I hesitate to label this feeling as guilt. I know that’s the script for cradle Catholics and I know exactly what those people are emphasizing when they say it. I left the Church behind for a little while. The warped, weaponized lash of doctrine, the manipulation of that human desire to live a good life, tainting it with shame and inadequacy. It’s sour. But embarrassment isn’t guilt, however easy they are to mistake for one another. 

The Catholic fixation on guilt is an outgrowth of the problem of sin, and I’ve come to understand guilt, true guilt uncolored by narcissism, as an appropriate acknowledgement of failure that requires no religion to comprehend. It’s possible, of course, to overdo it, to mire oneself in paranoia over action, intention, responsibility. This self-obsession is useful to no one. When I left Catholic school in high school, I learned that most people didn’t think this way, or at least, this much about morality. I put down religion, treated it as a developmental crucible I did not perform particularly well, took up the mantle of humanism and rationalism because it seemed to afford its followers a different flavor of righteousness, and embraced the seemingly harmless idea that you didn’t need God to be good. 

Of course, whenever I thought about faith or religion, whenever I talked to strangers and friends about it, I looped back round to talking about Catholic school and church. It was a dead thing to prod at, I thought. It wasn’t going anywhere, even as I envisioned myself as enlightened, as having moved on. I’m not that boy anymore. His life became my life, broken down into the soil of my adolescence, broken down into my adulthood. 

Quickly, I found that very little is linear in life and there is no membrane between past and present. A person may change, but some signature remains, almost an afterimage. I wanted life to function in just the opposite way—not only when it came to my relationship to religion, but also and especially when it came to morality. I wanted my decisions and the actions that followed, whether methodical or impulsive, to fade away as soon as they occurred. Every moment a clean slate. Every instance not necessarily meaningless but untethered from judgment. 

I thought as much and lived as much for a while. And yet, looking back, I see how I behaved as if I was trying to disprove a theory, to embody a secular alternative. The problem was I had never stopped talking to God and when people asked if I believed in Him, I was only ever lying when I said no. 

• • •

“The Church exists, as I have explained earlier on, at the sacramental level, a sort of intermediate level between the obviously visible and purely interior and personal.” Herbert McCabe, a Dominican priest I’ve become fixated on for several years now, wrote that in his first book The New Creation. It’s exactly the sort of language I was deaf to as a child and outright hostile to as a teenager. Much of the theological and academic jargon that is wielded in bad faith by smug conservative Catholics and PhDs seems intentionally opaque. Matters of spirit and belief are handled via assertions and declarations, making it seem like there’s little room for questioning or doubt. For a long time, I struggled with the picture McCabe sketches out in that sentence. I continue to struggle with it and I’ve come to believe that it is, in essence, what many other people struggle with: the intermediary between experience and understanding, between oneself and God. 

Americans are deathly allergic to the existence of middlemen, even as they love to employ them when their services suit their goals. That was my barrier to re-entry to religion. I wanted a supernatural epiphany. I wanted God to show me that what I’d learned in Catholic school was true. I wanted a moment. Instead, what I received was a series of encounters with unremarkable people. Most were not religious at all and the ones who were carried their belief with a sense of humor, almost impishness, a raised eyebrow. What these people demonstrated to me was a way of living out one’s life as an offering you didn’t ask for or even want at first but that, slowly, deliberately, could be shaped into a gift. 

Seen as such, life inspired a high standard of behavior—not as a shame-driven obligation, but as an opportunity to honor the God who bestowed it by honoring each other. This reframed a lingering problem that had never stopped plaguing me, even during my atheist years. What do you do with wrongness, with the feeling that one should live life a certain way? What do you do with evil, if such a thing exists? Was sin real after all? Of the many facets of religion I puzzled over as a child, sin seemed the least likely to stay with me. I wanted the superhero stuff, levitating saints, resurrection, armored angels spearing demons, wounds to symbolize one’s chosenness. Sin, especially original sin, seemed like such an obviously human fabrication, a psychic, arbitrary method of sifting the worthy from the doomed. For a while, whenever I felt the heat of shame or guilt after saying a cruel thing or choosing not to do the obviously right one, I’d wave it away as a vestige of a fucked-up childhood ensconced in archaic nonsense. And yet, in the back of my mind, I knew I was going out of my way to ignore the needling understanding that my actions mattered. 

• • •

I remember being very lonely as a child, and I remember many banal cruelties I inflicted on others, and I remember thinking that if God forgave me no matter what, there was no point in trying to be good. That was what saints were for, they existed to be the exception. 

By college, I’d found this line of thought nauseating, “a stark and utter saturation of self” as Christian Wiman calls it. I felt that sin was the only term that could apply to this wanton nihilism, this sense I had of moving through the world utterly isolated and defiant to the idea of duty. At least I’d never killed anyone. That was the bar. At least you’re not hurting anyone. It took me years to find the lie in that idea. William Stringfellow, a lay theologian, wrote in his polemic An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens In A Strange Land that “no violence is private…No human being is guiltless of any violence. There are never any innocent bystanders. No creature is exempted or exonerated from corporate and collective responsibility in violence.” Such strident moralizing reminded me of the cut-and-dried pedagogy of Catholic school, but in an enfranchising, rather than hermetic, direction. This notion of sin as a shared flaw compelled me not because it signalled that everyone sucked but rather because it meant that goodness was not a given. I’ve always recoiled at the platitude that people are good at heart. Whether or not it’s true is less important than whether people elect to nurture that goodness and allow it to guide them. 

Ultimately, Wiman and Stringfellow prepared me to engage with a theologian like McCabe. “One effect of sin is that it becomes harder for us to die,” McCabe writes in The New Creation. “Sin, besides turning us from God, binds us closer to ourselves, so that the abandonment of self becomes more difficult.” McCabe also terms this a “tendency to self-centredness,” a constant fascination with how one might choose to move through the world unmoored and unmoved by insipid things like love or pity. “As we know,” McCabe continues, “the human virtue of self-control cannot exist for long without divinely inspired self-denial, but soon degenerates into subtler forms of selfishness and pride.” In this way, sin isn’t a pointed finger. It’s a shrug. 

McCabe situates sin as a social matter. It “cuts us off from our union in Christ and this is a union with our fellow Christians,” it is “the cessation of charity, it means that the Spirit, the life-blood of the body, no longer flows through a particular member.” I remember reading that last line for the first time and feeling an unexpected dread. Dread because I had to admit to myself that I was compelled by the moral clarity of a left-influenced Catholicism, because I was walking back towards a faith I did not realize I had ever wanted. But then, how else to explain all the Catholic reading I was doing in my free time, the meanderings around churches as if I was casing them for a break-in, my eagerness to hear from and talk to former Catholics about their experiences? I was not being pulled back, I was making the choice myself. McCabe’s metaphor of life-blood and death with regards to sin affected me because I had seen it before. Not in the eyes of adulterers or addicts or gay people, the usual Catholic targets. The people I encountered who seemed to embody the most prurient and caustic of sins were attached to nothing and no one and acted accordingly. Maybe they called themselves patriots. Warriors for Christ. Defenders of tradition. Innovators. Changemakers. Maybe they coalesced into large, like-minded groups under different banners. But they were not people interested in living amongst other people. They wanted to live selectively and forever. They saw death as weakness. 

• • •

I’m sitting in a church in New York. The doors are open. There are four other people inside. Two, like me, seemed to have wandered in to find a quiet place to sit. I didn’t mean to find this particular church, but I almost never turn away from one if I’m nearby. The paint coating the vaulted ceiling is peeling in places, large strips hanging down like snakeskin. Whenever I step into a church, I feel overly conscious of my thoughts. I feel that I should be praying, but I’m often too distracted. I look around, I watch the people around me, I wonder if my faith is obvious enough. I do most of my praying in the bathroom in the early morning because it has the tight dimensions of a confessional. In churches, I talk to God in my head like free writing, I try to let whatever comes to mind go. 

Right now, I’m wondering about the political dimension of my faith. A right-wing pundit has just been assassinated and clips of him plague my timeline. In one, this young, brash, self-satisfied man delineates sin as a series of broken tenets. He reiterates the phrase “Sin no more.” I do not want to be thinking of this person, but everyone is talking about him. He loudly proclaimed he was a Christian so naturally I worry about the distance between him and me. I’m still not always quite comfortable calling myself a Christian. Maybe because it sounds so generic. I’m comfortable acknowledging that this dead pundit and I are both sinners, but this is a term he would levy in a manner I disagree with. 

Many claimed this man burned hot for his faith, that the fervor with which he preached and inveighed matched his commitment to God. The writer Kelly Hayes had the more accurate assessment: “The world is on fire, and an arsonist got burned.” When I live my life a certain way, in what I hope is a better, more honest way, I don’t win anything. I’m not granted special privileges. I’m not saving my country. I’m not protecting my family. And yet, so much of what I encounter in this time of prophets and soothsayers is the refrain that pantomiming goodness, discerning which people are the right ones to become corpses, and staying in prayer, always prayer, will result in a personal reward, as if God’s focus and adoration is for you and you alone. Solipsism masked as altruism. 

I try to give more of my life back to myself so that I might give myself to others. That is what I am working to hold on to, without coercion, without enticement. To be an extended hand. Enough of this territorial glibness, this literal-minded reading of the gospels. What about your heart? I have no patience for fearmongers who would use God as a cudgel. I’m making myself angry. 

I stand up. One of the people in this church hasn’t moved since I sat down. He’s been staring at the altar, mouth slightly ajar. I genuflect as I leave. I do not feel clean. I suspect I never will. This does not dissuade me.