Playing Graveyard

Cradle Catholic. Spicy chrism, baptism, incense, First Communion in a white dress, black burned palm fronds crunching across my forehead as the priest drew the Ash Wednesday cross. Belief was my heritage, passed down from immigrant grandmothers who kept cauldrons of chicken blood simmering on the stove. Rituals, saints, gore. Jesus bleeding openly, his eyes rolled back in agony in the church’s mosaic you could peek at any time you wanted. Throughout the church hung depictions of people suffering, no facts of death hidden. This is what it is, kid.

I appreciated being shown the truth, but I loved Easter and its sweet lambs and pastel frills best. Age seven, I sat in Mass, holding the toy from that year’s Easter basket, a plastic figurine of Garfield the cat, inside my white lace purse while I endured church in a fancy dress my mom had sewn. I checked on him. Garfield promised the party would start once the priest mumbled through the last word. Garfield’s idea of parties: lasagna, naps. My idea of parties: cousins, cake.

High school. My beloved uncle—who had driven me through the streets of Omaha in his red Corvette convertible, my hair whipping back in the breeze, my eyes shaded by my cousin’s sunglasses for a movie-star touch—died of brain cancer. My sports-hero brother blew out his knees and was always in the hospital having surgeries. In the ’90s in Denver where I lived, gangs battled for crack turf, shooting some of my classmates. During sophomore year I cowered on the floor, hiding from Bloods who roamed the halls seeking a rival, tapping the barrels of their guns against the little windows in the classroom doors. I felt unloved, unprotected, abandoned to the universe. God left me. It was a dumping. But I claimed I rejected God first.

For college, I went to a Catholic university halfway across the country, perhaps summoned by a faint homing instinct transmitted from my ancestors, a call to herd together with others of my kind. My dorm offered Mass downstairs in a chapel at ten o’clock on Sunday nights. My goofy friends performed as liturgical dancers, a role that required no skill. Girls down the hall baked Communion bread—not blank wafers, but dense, molasses-sweet wheat cubes. The quiet renegade nun who lived in our dorm, Sister Mary Anne, led us in a candlelight vigil to pray for women to be included in the priesthood. Our prayers during Mass were gender-neutral on the subject of God. Sister Mary Anne invited my female classmates to deliver homilies, knowing which priests would agree. When my friends weren’t preaching, it was Father Dunne, who talked about Narnia and Buddhism. The sign of peace at these Masses was always a hug, and the ritual went on forever because we hugged everyone. And me so far from home, and so in need of their embrace. We sang, and no one cared how bad we sounded. I let God woo me back, a little.

I grew up and had an inquisitive, skeptical boy. I wanted to give him access to this community: my people of the dirt, of honest gore. These were the ones who didn’t throw out the flawed, the suffering. In Mass together, we sat next to screaming babies and adults who let out periodic yelps. But he wasn’t buying it. He hated church and Sunday school and all of it. You’ve got it out of order, I thought. You’ve got to embrace this now, so you can reject it later and then come back. But that was my pattern, not his. When I was his age, I valued this religion for its honesty—but now we knew its leaders had hurt children and lied.

I took him to the small stone church connected to the university in our town, with young priests and a welcoming attitude. Two miles down the road from our home was a Catholic church I distrusted, its grounds too expansive, its buildings too large and bright. Once a year they filled their lawn with thousands of miniature crosses.

One day when my son and I drove by this display, he asked, “What is that?”

He was seven. I wasn’t ready to explain what abortion was or the parts of my religion I didn’t agree with, such as those eager to control and chastise women for trouble they didn’t get into by themselves. I was still trying to get him to buy in—to the rituals, the mystery—so he had something concrete to reject later. “I’m not sure,” I said.

He persisted. “A graveyard?”

“Something like that.”

He wasn’t satisfied. He gazed at all those miniature crosses as we passed by. He thought for a while. “Are they playing graveyard?”

I looked at him in the rearview mirror. “Exactly,” I said. He’d discerned the truth I’d tried to conceal, as children do. “They are playing graveyard.”

Read more from Issue 18.1.